In “Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living,” John Kaag and Jonathan Van Belle note that Thoreau was hardly a slacker. “What is leisure but opportunity for more complete and entire action?” he asked. By walking four or six hours and thinking as he went, he managed to write several thousand words a day.
The book I am reading at the moment is due back. Do I bother to renew it electronically? And if I have no more renewals, do I keep it and finish or bring it back anyway? It seems that only money, not respect for other readers, has driven my actions all these years, a terrible realization on which I prefer not to linger. Money is the yardstick for value, right? And what has more value than books?
“Einstein’s Dreams” is one of those elegant, deceptively simple books you know you need to reread a couple thousand times to fully grasp. Not that the book contains answers; what it contains are possibilities that act like crowbars, wedging your mind open. Now Alan Lightman has a new three-part documentary, “Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science,” that acts the same way.
Depression, emptiness, anomie, acedia—we have all sorts of words for this soulsickness. A midlife crisis is simply the announcement of a need for a different, more compelling purpose. Quiet quitting says the job was not worth doing.
Dogs used to have the run of a neighborhood; there were fewer rules about where they could eliminate, fewer leash laws, more actual jobs they could do for us. Now they are pampered and controlled with an iron fist by people terrified of fines, lawsuits, or disapproving neighbors.
Those were long-cooled facts; they held none of the warmth of his flesh. Genealogy is fun detective work, but I understood the hollow feeling in the email’s last sentence: “I have no idea who he was or what he was about.”
Above all, I was impressed by the chatbot’s staunch refusal to give a subjective opinion. I baited it again and again, and its responses sounded like a wise aunt refusing to be drawn into your argument with your parents. In a world splashed with bias, this was refreshing.
For a month or two, the air fryer will be an amusement, a challenge, perhaps even a slight thrill, if we do fall in love. If we do not, I will soak in guilt for having caved to all the ads, the enthusiasm of friends who shop more than I do, and the illusion that a kitchen device can change taste, discipline, and habit.
Plato insisted that mathematics strengthened the mind for other tasks. Abraham Lincoln set out to master Euclid’s treatises on geometry in order to sharpen his use of language and logic. Mathematician and author Manil Suri says research has disproved the assumption. “The theory of formal discipline says if you exercise your brain in one aspect it can leapfrog and help you do other tasks. It doesn’t.”
Organized religions, at least the traditional monotheistic ones, are stingy in assigning a soul (only to humans) and defining its fate (blackened by sin). They bottle up the holy water, decree which acts are sins and which are virtues, box up God in a package of their own design. Why not let divinity spread out and envelop us, until we can see some faint glow of energy even in the inanimate?
Essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out that as we grow older and more curious, we accumulate an “antilibrary” of unread books that are far more valuable than the books we have already read. Having an antilibrary keeps us humble and curious, he says. It “challenges our self-estimation by providing a constant, niggling reminder of all we don’t know.”
In the world of metaphor, flying just means breaking free of gravity’s pull, shaking off restrictions, soaring under our own power, reaching new heights. Live right, and you are already flying. But could I manage a life that dramatic?