"..." 41

“A life without once reading Hamlet is like a life spent in a coal mine.”

-Hector Berlioz

The Swartz Imperative

“You literally ought to be asking yourself all the time what is the most important thing in the world [you] could be working on right now, and if you are not working on that why aren’t you?”

– Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, describing the views
of Aaron Swartz in The Internet's Own Boy (2014)

"..." 40

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.

—Franz Kafka, 1904

Last page of Norwegian Wood

This passage really resonated with me; it's probably my favorite bit from the whole novel. It's funny that endings do that sometimes—a story drags on... and on... and then flowers into something beautiful just as it reaches its close.

Possible spoilers ahead (but not really).

I phoned Midori.

"I have to talk to you" I said. "I have a million things to talk to you about. A million things we have to talk about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning."

Midori responded with a long, long silence - the silence of all the misty rain in the world falling on all the new-mown lawns of the world. Forehead pressed against the glass, I shut my eyes and waited. At last, Midori's quiet voice broke the silence: "Where are you now?"

Where was I now? Gripping the receiver, I raised my head and turned to see what lay beyond the phone box. Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again I called out for Midori from the dead center of this place that was no place.

"..." 39

When I was 28 years old, I came back home for the first time in six years fully aware that I was the black sheep. I had rejected my faith. I had rejected Tucson, Arizona. I was the only one in the family who wasn't married. I was the only one who couldn't even speak Spanish.

And I was just sitting with my dad in a booth at a diner, and it should have been just this kind of innocent thing, where I'm visiting after six years, and it's nice to catch up. But it wasn't like that. We were facing each other. We both had, as it happens, cowboy hats and cowboy boots. And I remember thinking, this is a showdown. Because my dad and I were at war. My dad didn't know this, but I was at war with him. I was at war with all Christians, and I was just waiting for an excuse to fire a shot.

I'd been raised an evangelical Christian-- you know, conservative, Bible believing Christian-- and I loved it so much that I said, I'm going to be a pastor. I'm going to learn everything I can learn. And I went off and I majored in religious studies in college. And from my very first scholarly class in the history of the Bible, my faith began to crumble until there was nothing left. And I now had this game I could play, where if you open a Bible to any page, I could find five flaws in it.

So I'd spent this entire time, not just with my dad, but certainly this particular evening, just waiting for a chance. Just mention the virgin birth, just once, and I'll tell you it's a mistranslation from Isaiah. Just mention Second Peter and I can prove to you it's a second century forgery. You know, say anything at all, please, please, about the Antichrist, revelation, the end times, anything like that, and I have a screed set up that's so blistering it would make Billy Graham feel ridiculous. And I had all this ammunition, and I couldn't wait to use it. I was just looking for an excuse. And it sort of turned me into a jackass.

Now what my dad didn't know was that one of the reasons I was so excited is I actually was just coming off a victory. The previous night, I had argued my brother-in-law to a standstill. He had mentioned something about how proud he was about being a Christian, because everything in the Bible was so scientifically accurate. And I went a little nuts and I said, "Oh yeah, what about this thing?" And there's this tiny little section, just one sentence in like, Exodus, where the Israelites are fighting the Amorites or somebody, and God does a miracle where he makes the sun stand still for an entire day, in order to give the Israelites a chance to recover, and give them more time to fight.

And I told my brother-in-law, "You really believe this? You believe this actually happened? That God stopped the entire planet from rotating, stopped gravity, all of things that would have to happen for the sun to stand still? Is that the most sensible thing the most powerful being in the world can do?" And my brother-in-law said, "Well, OK, that's weird, and I wish it weren't in there, but if I doubt that, where do I stop?"

And that, I knew, was as close as I was going to get to him saying, "You're right and I'm wrong." I remember looking at the clock, and it was five in the morning. I had argued this one point for seven hours. And I realized, this is like my job. I just put in a full working day. Obviously, I was obsessed.

At the time I was 28 years old. I was also a virgin, and I'd been a virgin because the Bible says so, because I thought Jesus wanted it that way. And then Jesus vanished on me. I had spent all of my life trying to be good, trying to do the right thing, and, you know, trusting that this would be rewarded. And then my faith collapsed.

And there's no betrayal like losing 10 years of your life, you know, your sexual peak basically. I'm never going to get that back. And I was furious. And I didn't know who to blame. But I knew I could help other people from having the same horrible experience. And I was looking at my brother-in-law thinking, you know, we were arguing about Genesis, but in my mind I was thinking, there is no way you have a good sex life. You know, because the Bible doesn't care, and pleasure doesn't even matter in the Bible. But I can save you.

And with this kind of exciting, thrilling victory still kind of humming in the back of my head, I was sitting there with my dad in the diner. Because a brother-in-law is one thing, a dad is someone else. I needed to save him. And so I said, "So, dad, what's your life like right now?" And he said, "Well, I found a new church home." And I heard church, and I perked up, and I was ready to go. But I thought, eh, church, not much to argue about there, people go to church, OK, it's nothing biblical.

And he said, "You know, it's a small church, and the pastor found out that I play the accordion, and he made me the music minister, that'll be nice." And again, I was like, [? tightened, ?] but I thought, "Meh, music ministry, no, nothing there." And then he said, "You know, this other kind of interesting thing is happening, I've been praying about it, and I think I'm going to be a missionary." And that struck a chord. I sat upright, and I went, "Oh really? A missionary? Where are you going to go?" And then he said, "Oh, Spain."

And I snapped. I said, "Oh, of course. Of course you're going to go to Spain. That is so arrogant. Only an evangelical Christian would say, oh, those poor benighted Spaniards need to learn about Jesus." "You know," I said, "evangelical Christianity as a way, the whole model of salvation that you guys preach, wasn't even around till the 19th century. You claim to represent all of Christianity, and you're really just the tiny sliver at the end of the iceberg. And you know, the model of salvation you're even selling is so weird. Conversion should be the response of the whole person to a call from God on a deep personal level, and evangelical Christians have turned it into this transaction, like a merchandise, like a, try our God and your life will be better. Say this prayer, and now here's the merchandising table. It's just horrible."

"And dad," I said, "You're saving people? What are you saving them from? Hell, may I guess? Because let me point something else out to you. Hell is a mistranslation from the King James of four completely different words for the afterlife. Gehenna, and hades, and sheol, and King James just kind of rounded them all up to hell. And the idea of eternal torture has no precedent in the Old Testament. It has never made any moral sense. And the second you believe in hell, you're undermining everything good. Because a morality based in fear can only bring out the worst in people, and never their best."

And I just rambled on like this. And I knew, essentially, while I was doing this, I was also assaulting his dream. You know, saying everything he was excited about, that he was sharing with me, was misbegotten, was a bad idea, was morally corrupt. But all he had to do was admit I was right and then we'd be OK. And I really didn't know what was going to happen now, because I'd just fired the first shot.

And he just kind of quietly let me do my thing. And when I'd settled down and, you know, gotten my peace out, he said, "David, I'm really proud of everything you've done. And I'm really glad that you enjoy studying all these things, and thinking all these thoughts. But I've got to tell you, before I became a Christian, I was miserable. I wanted to kill myself. I wanted to get a divorce from your mom."

And I remembered, suddenly, like I was six years old, and I was back in the car, and I remember driving in the station wagon with my dad from South Dakota to Tucson, because dad had had a miserable life, had a nervous breakdown, he was rebuilding everything. And he was holding a cigarette out the window the whole ride down. I remember, as a child, this had had a strong impression on me. About halfway through the trip, he simply threw away all of his cigarettes, never picked them up again. That was his conversion, that was the start of the change in his life.

And my dad continued, he said, "You know, when I first went to Grace Chapel," which was the church where he had converted, he said, "I thought those people were crazy." And when I was eight years old, I had gone to Grace Chapel with him. And this was a charismatic church. The kind where people raise their hands, and they speak in tongues, and they anoint people with oil, and they pray for miraculous healings, and people roll on the ground sometimes, or dance.

And my dad said, "You know, I was just staring at the stuff these people were doing, and I thought, this is crazy. But I could not ignore the love in that room, and the care they had for each other. And I kept going back, and I kept going back. And I wanted it to make sense to me. And finally one night, I prayed, and I said, God, if I have to cut my own head off to be happy, I will do it. So I know you've gone to college, and you've learned all these things, but here's what I know, David. I followed Jesus and the lord gave me a family."

My parents really had almost gotten divorced. I remember one time, I ran across a notebook where my dad and my mom had divided everything up on a piece of paper. You know, who was going to get the TV and that kind of thing. And they'd gotten that close. And then my dad converted, and he said, "No, we're sticking this out. I'm going to make this work." And it had.

And my brother too, you know, he's deeply conservative, listens to all the kind of, you know, right wing talk radio and so forth. And he's got to be convinced that I'm going to hell. But this one time, I was on this trip, and I was a student, and he gave me $300 and he said, "Don't bother repaying it."

And I remember looking at my dad, and I thought-- I had sort of expected to argue like I had with my brother-in-law. You know, not to win, but to come to some kind of armistice. You know, some kind of truce where we're like, "Well, we'll agree to disagree, but I see your point. It's a good point." I hadn't expected to lose completely, because you can't argue with decency. You can't argue with goodness.

The thing about the Bible is it's huge. I could poke at it because I could pick at anything I wanted-- you know, talking snakes, virgin birth-- but eventually, I came around to thinking, well, maybe religion doesn't have to be consistent. Maybe you can just like it enough for it to be good. You know, maybe religion can be something more like-- like I'm a big Star Trek fan, and if you asked me, I would say like, I love Star Trek. But if you asked me to defend individual episodes, I would be at a loss, because I can't go to bat for everything Star Trek did. I just love the concept.

And maybe religion could be like that. So what I said to my dad was, "Oh, look, here comes the waitress." And we got our Sprite, and had our hamburgers, and we looked at each other, raised the glass, had a bite, and my dad didn't know this, but we were having communion.

—David Ellis Dickerson

1. Transcript from This American Life

The Story of the Monkeys of Shitty Island

From The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami:

"Do you know the story of the monkeys of the shitty island?" I asked Noburo Wataya.

He shook his head, with no sign of interest. "Never heard of it."

"Somewhere, far, far away, there’s a shitty island. An island without a name. An island not worth giving a name. A shitty island with a shitty shape. On this shitty island grow palm trees that have also have shitty shapes. And the palm trees produce coconuts that give off a shitty smell. Shitty monkeys live in the trees, and they love to eat these shitty-smelling coconuts after which they shit the world’s foulest shit. The shit falls on the ground and builds up shitty mounds, making the shitty palm trees that grow on them even shittier. It’s an endless cycle.”

I drank the rest of my coffee.

"As I sat here looking at you," I continued, "I suddenly remembered the story of this shitty island. What I'm trying to say is this: A certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propagating itself with its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it - even if the person himself wants to stop it."

Banksy on advertising

From Cut It Out:

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

"..." 38

In John Cocteau's 1950 movie Orpheus, the title character is a modern poet whose poems are dictated to him by a voice on his car radio. He journeys to hell in order to bring back his missing wife Eurydice. While there, he is interrogated by three sinister judges who ask him, among other things what he does. He answers that he is a poet. When one of the judges replies, "What does that mean?" Orpheus says, "It means to write and not be a writer."

This distinction holds generally true, I think. For instance in the title of the contemporary magazine that deals with issues of writing and publishing called Poets and Writers. As it happens, the current number has an article by Ellen Susman about writers should reply when asked at a party, "What do you do?" She says, "You write because it's your passion, your lifeblood, and yet you tell this lovely person that you're an accountant, a house husband, a cowpoke. Repeat after me," Ms. Susman says, "I'm a writer, it's my job, it's what I do."

That's fine if you are a writer, say a novelist like her, but what if you're a poet? You would never reply, "I'm a poet," out of fear that your interlocutor would get up and leave the room. It sounds like you're conferring value on yourself. You can't be a poet who calls himself or herself a poet without leaving open the possibility that you're a bad poet. So you're stuck with the situation of writing and not being a writer.

If this sounds like whining, then let me add hastily that I'm quite pleased with my status in the world of writers. I've been lucky enough to get concrete signs of appreciation over the years. One of them arrived 35 years ago when I got the National Book Award. But even without them, I think I would have continued writing just for the, well, fun of it, because it is fun, although it isn't supposed to be. If it wasn't, I would have taken up some alternate pursuit years ago: needlepoint or designing miniature golf courses. But writing the poetry I write gives me a pleasure I can almost taste, one I can imagine a pianist must feel practicing in solitude, but never alone thanks to the strange experience that is emerging in him. Of course it's hard to write, but somehow the the difficulty is embedded in the pleasure.

Besides the vexacious pleasure of writing and not being a writer, there is a further concern for me in that to many people, intelligent and honest ones among them, what I write makes no sense. It apparently lacks accessibility, a relatively recent requirement.

When I first discovered modern poetry at the age of about 16, I was delighted by its difficulty, a word often used since then in discussions of my work, and in general by what Gates calls the fascination of what's difficult. My first encounter with Gertrude Stein, for instance, inspired me to instant feats of imitation. "She's so great, she's so hard to understand" might have summed up my reaction. Several years later, my advisers at Harvard (they call them tutors just as they call the dormitories houses--a bit of inverse snobbery) assigned me Henry James' The Wings of the Dove, the  first book of his I had come upon. Once again, I tore through it, delightedly. "Wow, this is really difficult," I thought. Contemporaneous was my discovery of the poetry of Eliot, Stevens, and the gnomic, early Auden, all of whom became important influences.

My early poetry, I thought, was in the grand, modern tradition of being hard to understand. Besides, wasn't this what modern art was all about? Picasso painted heads with three eyes and viewers looked on with equanimity. Stravinski had four pianists banging the some chord over and over and audiences were enthralled. It wasn't until I began to publish some years later that I realized I had trespassed. It was okay for those god-like figures to traffic in difficulty, I was given to understand, but my own stuff was just a little too difficult--in fact, a lot too difficult, ranking somewhere near root canal on the pleasure principal scale.

Besides, by then, difficulty was out. Accessiblity was in. These thoughts dawned anew a few days ago when wondering what I would say tonight. I happened to glance at the acceptance speech I wrote on getting a National Book Award in 1976--I didn't happen to glance at it, I searched for diligently on the internet.

For as long as I have been publishing poetry, it has been criticized as difficult and private, although I never meant for it to be. At least I wanted its privateness to suggest the ways in which all of us are private and alone, in the sense that Proust meant when he said, "Each of us is truly alone." And I wanted the difficulty to reflect the difficulty of reading, any kind of reading, which is both a pleasant and painful experience since we are temporarily giving ourselves to something which may change us.

I seem to have been writing out of this situation for many years, including in a fairly recent poem called "Uptick" which has the lines:

To come back for a few hours to
the present subject, a painting,
looking like it was seen,
half turning around, slightly apprehensive,  
but it has to pay attention
to what’s up ahead: a vision.
Therefore poetry dissolves in
brilliant moisture and reads us
to us.
A faint notion. Too many words,
but precious.

So the dilemma hasn't gone away, but then I console myself, neither have I...yet. I'm still writing and still not a writer. The pleasure that comes from writing is a sharp as ever. [...]

—John Ashberry

"..." 36 & 37

"My destiny is solitude, and my life is work." -Wagner

"[T]here are two kinds of people in this world--the hardcore and the spouse-core." -attributed to Ralph Nader

Ira Shor on education "God-words"

I'd go as far as saying that there is no such thing as 'a sound education,' just as there are no such things as 'basic education,' 'basic skills,' or 'basic writing.' In addition, I'd add my disagreement with the notion of a 'core curriculum' or 'general education.' My sense is that these phrases are code words to disguise or to deny that all education is politics, that all pedagogies are ideological, that all curricular choices are value-laden, and that stunningly different outcomes emerge from schooling based on the income of a student's family. Angelic or neutral terms like 'basic,' 'sound,' and 'general' are God-words that rhetorically disguise the inequities and ideologies of the status quo. If something is labeled as 'sound' or 'basic,' then it lays claim to the status of the inevitable and the unarguable. But, I propose that all forms of education are socially constructed and that none can be neutral.

Source: Shor, I. (2006). War, lies, and pedagogy: Teaching in fearful times. Radical teacher 77, pp. 30-5.

"..." 35

"People who speak different languages live in different worlds, not the same world with different labels."

—Edward Sapir, 1928

"..." 34 (two kinds of lifelong readers)

To the extent that novelists think about audience at all, we like to imagine a "general audience"—a large, eclectic pool of decently educated people who can be induced, by strong enough reviews or aggressive enough marketing, to treat themselves to a good, serious book. We do our best not to notice that, among adults with similar educations and similarly complicated lives, some read a lot of novels while others read few or none.

[Shirly Brice] Heath has noticed this circumstance, and although she emphasized to me that she has not polled everybody in America, her research effectively demolishes the myth of the general audience. For a person to sustain an interest in literature, she told me, two things have to be in place. First, the habit of reading works of substance must have been "heavily modeled" when he or she was very young. In other words, one or both of the parents must have been reading serious books and must have encouraged the child to do the same. [...]

Simply having a parent who reads is not enough, however, to produce a lifelong dedicated reader. According to Heath, young readers also need to find a person with whom they can share their interest. "A child who's got the habit will start reading under the covers with a flashlight," she said. "If the parents are smart, they'll forbid the child to do this, and thereby encourage her. Otherwise she'll find a peer who also has the habit, and the two of them will keep it a secret between them. Finding a peer can take place as late as college. In high school, especially, there's a social penalty to be paid for being a reader. Lots of kids who have been lone readers get to college and suddenly discover, 'Oh my God, there are other people here who read.'"

As Heath unpacked her findings for me, I was remembering the joy with which I'd discovered two friends in junior high with whom I could talk about J. R. R. Tolkien. I was also considering that for me, today, there is nothing sexier than a reader. But then it occurred to me that I didn't even meet Heath's first precondition. I told her I didn't remember either of my parents ever reading a book when I was a child, except aloud to me.

Without missing a beat Heath replied: "Yes, but there's a second kind of reader. There's the social isolate—the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him. This is very, very difficult to uncover in an interview. People don't like to admit that they were social isolates as children. What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can't share with the people around you—because it's imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read. Though they aren't present, they become your community."

[...]

According to Heath, readers of the social-isolate variety (she calls them "resistant" readers) are much more likely to become writers than those of the modeled-habit variety. If writing was the medium of communication within the community of childhood, it makes sense that when writers grow up they continue to find writing vital to their sense of connectedness. What's perceived as the antisocial nature of "substantive" authors, whether it's James Joyce's exile or J. D. Salinger's reclusion, derives in large part from the social isolation that's necessary for inhabiting a imagined world. Looking me in the eye, Heath said: "You are a socially isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world."

Source: Franzen, Jonathan. "Why Bother?" How to Be Alone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002: 74-78. Print. [My emphasis]

"..." 33 ("Today's Baudelaire's are hip-hop artists.")

In the nineteenth century, when Dickens and Darwin and Disraeli all read one another's work, the novel was the preeminent medium of social instruction. A new book by Thackeray or William Dean Howells was anticipated with the kind of fever that a late-December film release inspires today.

The big, obvious reason for the decline of the social novel is that modern technologies do a much better job of social instruction. Television, radio, and photographs are vivid, instantaneous media. Print journalism, too, in the wake of In Cold Blood, has become a viable creative alternative to the novel. Because they command large audiences, TV and magazines can afford to gather vast quantities of information quickly. Few serious novelists can pay for a quick trip to Singapore, or for the mass of expert consulting that gives serial TV dramas like E.R. and NYPD Blue their veneer of authenticity. The writer of average talent who wants to report on, say, the plight of illegal aliens would be foolish to choose the novel as a vehicle. Ditto the writer who wants to offend prevailing sensibilities. Portnoy's Complaint, which even my mother once heard enough about to disapprove of, was probably the last American novel that could have appeared on Bob Dole's radar as a nightmare of depravity. Today's Baudelaire's are hip-hop artists.

Source: Franzen, Jonathan. "Why Bother?" How to Be Alone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002: 65-66. Print. [My emphasis]

"..." 32

The life of mankind could very well be conceived as a speech in which different men represented the various parts of speech (that might also be applied to the nations in the relations to one another). How many people are merely adjectives, interjections, conjunctions, adverbs; and how few are substantives, verbs, etc.; how many are copula?
    In relation to each other men are like irregular verbs in different languages; nearly all verbs are slightly irregular.
    There are people whose position in life is like that of the interjection, without influence on the sentence— There are the hermits of life, and at the very most take a case, e.g., O me miserum.
    Our politicians are like Greek reciprocals (alleeloin) which are wanting in the nominative singular and all subjective cases. They can only be thought of in the plural and possessive cases.
    The sad thing about me is that my life (the condition of my soul) changes according to declensions where not only the endings change but the whole word is altered.

—Søren Kierkegaard

"..." 31

[Marshall] McLuhan wrote that our tools end up "numbing" whatever part of our body they "amplify." When we extend some part of ourselves artificially, we also distance ourselves from the amplified part of its natural functions. When the power loom was invented, weavers could manufacture far more cloth during the course of a workday than they'd been able to make by hand, but they sacrificed some of their manual dexterity, not to mention some of their "feel" for fabric. Their fingers, in McLuhan's terms, became numb. Farmers, similarly, lost some of their feel for the soil when they began using mechanical harrows and plows. Today's industrial farm worker, sitting in his air-conditioned cage atop a gargantuan tractor, rarely touches the soil at all—though in a single day he can till a field that his hoe-wielding forebear could not have turned in a month. When we're behind the wheel of our car, we can go a far greater distance than we could cover on foot, but we lose the walker's intimate connection to the land.
[...]
    The price we pay to assume technology's power is alienation. The toll can be particularly high with our intellectual technologies. The tools of the mind amplify and in turn numb the most intimate, the most human, of our natural capacities—those for reason, perception, memory, and emotion. The mechanical clock, for all the blessings it bestowed, removed us from the natural flow of time. When Lewis Mumford described how modern clocks helped "create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences," he also stressed that, as a consequence, clocks "disassociated time from human events." [...] In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to wake up, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock. We became a lot more scientific, but we became a bit more mechanical as well.
[...]
    In explaining how technologies numb the very faculties they amplify [...] McLuhan was not trying to romanticize society as it existed before the invention of maps or clocks or power looms. Alienation, he understood, is an inevitable by-product of the use of technology. Whenever we use a tool to exert greater control over the outside world, we change our relationship with that world. Control can be wielded only from a psychological distance.

From: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, 2010, pp. 210-212.

"..." 30

The majority of men are subjective towards themselves and objective towards all others, terribly objective sometimes—but the real task is in fact to be objective towards oneself and subjective towards all others.

—Kierkegaard, Papier VIII, p. A308

12/30 update:

My interpretation:

When people view themselves they often do so without judgment, accepting as they do that they are fluid individuals who cannot be defined or essentialized by any single moment. The self is always in progress, never fully formed, and the path it follows is only made as it goes.

Meanwhile, people often view others as finished products. Coldly, objectively—by facts rather than possibilities.

The advice, then, is this:

Be harsh on yourself; judge yourself by facts and by your actions. But, all the while, acknowledge your own perspective when you consider others, and don't judge them.

This may not have been exactly what Kierkegaard meant, but it works just as well for me.

"..." 29

For me, this is probably the most concise statement that I have found which sums up the relationship between philosophy and language. It is quoted from an interview by Robert Harrison in 2005, which happens to be available on iTunesU:

There are stories—historical narratives—to be told about the emergence of various discourses. My view is that when you’ve told the story about how the discourse emerged you’ve told everything—you’ve found out everything there is to know about the nature of mind, the nature of matter, the nature of God, stuff like that. There isn’t a further question about “Yeah, but what are they really?” All that there is to know is the story of how the words are used.

—Richard Rorty

"..." 28

"Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge. This is an art very difficult to impart. Whenever a textbook is written of real educational worth, you may be quite certain that some reviewer will say that it will be difficult to teach from it. Of course it will be difficult to teach from it. If it were easy, the book ought to be burned; for it cannot be educational."

—Alfred North Whitehead, "The Aims of Education"

"..." 27

Our society resembles the ultimate machine which I once saw in a New York toy shop. It was a metal casket which, when you touched a switch, snapped open to reveal a mechanical hand. Chromed fingers reached out for the lid, pulled it down, and locked it from the inside. It was a box; you expected to be able to take something out of it; yet all it contained was a mechanism for closing the cover. This contraption is the opposite of Pandora's "box."

—Ivan Illich

... 26

(Jerome Bruner. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds.)

Perhaps Richard Rorty is right in characterizing the mainstream of Anglo-American philosophy (which, on the whole, he rejects) as preoccupied with the epistemological question of how to know truth—which he contrasts with the broader question of how we come to endow experience with meaning, which is the question that preoccupies the poet and the storyteller. (p. 12)

The most general implication [of a "hermeneutic" or transactional view] is that a culture is constantly in process of being recreated as it is interpreted and renegotiated by its members. In this view, a culture is as much a forum for negotiating and renegotiating meaning and for explicating action as it is a set of rules or specifications for action. (p. 123)