Heeding the Crocodiles
Monday, October 27, 2008
Reading Is Fundamental
One of the sections of Coming Up For Air with which I could identify was about Bowling's time being stationed on the coast of England and assigned to guard essentially nothing. During that time of idleness he discovers books, and has the time for uninterrupted, concentrated, reading.
There were times during my deployments in the service that all I really had to do during downtimes was to read, and I did. Unfortunately, it wasn't a time like Bowling's, as I had actual duties to perform, but when one is in the field and there's nothing to do after one's 12-16-hour workday, and there's no access to beer, reading was for me the only activity. Provided, of course, that I wasn't out in the field with the MPs or grunts, in which case reading was difficult to impossible because of the requirements of "light discipline" (not discipline with a light touch, but discipline in the use of light).
It was when I went to work for my family that I got a lot of reading in. This was because, whenever I was not assigned to work which required me to move between several different places, or the work was unsupervised, I would go hide and read. I'm not proud of it, but it's the truth. Now years have passed, so my shame is mixed with some amusement at the irony of having used those hours of assiduously avoided labor to read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and listen to right-wing talk radio with its praise of the value of salt-of-the-earth disciplined hard work.
But leaving my hypocrisy aside, there was something magical about those hours. Unlike Bowling, I read under the threat of discovery all of the time. And paradoxically that made me concentrate more, I think, on what I was reading than less. If I felt I might have an hour without interruption, I would read as if reading itself were a criminal enterprise, concentrating as if I were trying to hear the tumblers on a bank safe I was trying to crack. It's too bad that I used many of those hours on Ayn Rand, but I was in my mid-twenties, so I beg forgiveness. Rush Limbaugh did me more good on balance than Rand probably did-though reading Rand was important in that it gave me a picture of libertarian utopia, so it helped to temper my temperament, especially once I began to understand modern (American) conservative thought.
I wish I could say that I used those hours to read the greeks, plus Hayek, Burke, Chesterton, Friedman, and the rest, but I didn't. Instead I read biographies of people like Churchill and MacArthur, along with quite a few novels. My thinking has been shaped much more by reading those who have read the "primary sources", rather than by having read those sources myself. This has been more useful to me than having read the primary sources, as a) it would've taken me so much longer to build up a familiarity with the ideas of Hayek, et al, if I had read them on my own; and more painfully b) I really doubt that on my own I would have understood their arguments and the importance and implications of them. Can I personally get more out of reading Hayek than reading Sowell on Hayek? Probably not, but I will eventually give The Road To Serfdom a try, since I own it and I'd like to be able to say I read it-along with Das Kapital. At first blush reading them after reading so much analysis of them strikes me as cheating, but upon reflection I realize that I'm simply taking the equivalent of a very protracted (and, I hope, good) college class in political philosophy and economics for the innumerate.
That is one of the prices paid by the auto-didact. A formal education on these topics would have saved me time in that I could have (or not) crammed much of the information I've picked up over the years into a semester or two (which is the point of college, generally speaking). But it wouldn't have done this for me, and that's why I did not graduate from college. Now I think I could keep up, as it interests me, but I can't say that the seventeen-year-old version of me could. I'm not smart enough to really learn something if I'm not interested in it (and even then it's dodgy). When I went to college I was a vocal music major, then after a semester I was a political science major, but the latter was all on paper. It sounded better to me than being a sociology or english major-and with less reading than the english major required. After a semester during which I went to about a week of classes as the start of the semester and then no more, I was asked not to return. The big problem was that I didn't want to do any work, so I didn't go to class. The ostrich method of college was my technique, and it worked: soon I didn't have to go to college at all.
After that came time working for the family business (dreadful), a tour in the USMC (pretty good), more time working for the family business (soul killing, except for the reading), and then a move and change of career (pretty good). Things are so much better now than in my "young Bowling days", but I wish sometimes that I could have back those hours of focus. Though I realize (since I'm conservative) that life changes and some things do not come back. ¶ 11:13 1 comments
There were times during my deployments in the service that all I really had to do during downtimes was to read, and I did. Unfortunately, it wasn't a time like Bowling's, as I had actual duties to perform, but when one is in the field and there's nothing to do after one's 12-16-hour workday, and there's no access to beer, reading was for me the only activity. Provided, of course, that I wasn't out in the field with the MPs or grunts, in which case reading was difficult to impossible because of the requirements of "light discipline" (not discipline with a light touch, but discipline in the use of light).
It was when I went to work for my family that I got a lot of reading in. This was because, whenever I was not assigned to work which required me to move between several different places, or the work was unsupervised, I would go hide and read. I'm not proud of it, but it's the truth. Now years have passed, so my shame is mixed with some amusement at the irony of having used those hours of assiduously avoided labor to read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and listen to right-wing talk radio with its praise of the value of salt-of-the-earth disciplined hard work.
But leaving my hypocrisy aside, there was something magical about those hours. Unlike Bowling, I read under the threat of discovery all of the time. And paradoxically that made me concentrate more, I think, on what I was reading than less. If I felt I might have an hour without interruption, I would read as if reading itself were a criminal enterprise, concentrating as if I were trying to hear the tumblers on a bank safe I was trying to crack. It's too bad that I used many of those hours on Ayn Rand, but I was in my mid-twenties, so I beg forgiveness. Rush Limbaugh did me more good on balance than Rand probably did-though reading Rand was important in that it gave me a picture of libertarian utopia, so it helped to temper my temperament, especially once I began to understand modern (American) conservative thought.
I wish I could say that I used those hours to read the greeks, plus Hayek, Burke, Chesterton, Friedman, and the rest, but I didn't. Instead I read biographies of people like Churchill and MacArthur, along with quite a few novels. My thinking has been shaped much more by reading those who have read the "primary sources", rather than by having read those sources myself. This has been more useful to me than having read the primary sources, as a) it would've taken me so much longer to build up a familiarity with the ideas of Hayek, et al, if I had read them on my own; and more painfully b) I really doubt that on my own I would have understood their arguments and the importance and implications of them. Can I personally get more out of reading Hayek than reading Sowell on Hayek? Probably not, but I will eventually give The Road To Serfdom a try, since I own it and I'd like to be able to say I read it-along with Das Kapital. At first blush reading them after reading so much analysis of them strikes me as cheating, but upon reflection I realize that I'm simply taking the equivalent of a very protracted (and, I hope, good) college class in political philosophy and economics for the innumerate.
That is one of the prices paid by the auto-didact. A formal education on these topics would have saved me time in that I could have (or not) crammed much of the information I've picked up over the years into a semester or two (which is the point of college, generally speaking). But it wouldn't have done this for me, and that's why I did not graduate from college. Now I think I could keep up, as it interests me, but I can't say that the seventeen-year-old version of me could. I'm not smart enough to really learn something if I'm not interested in it (and even then it's dodgy). When I went to college I was a vocal music major, then after a semester I was a political science major, but the latter was all on paper. It sounded better to me than being a sociology or english major-and with less reading than the english major required. After a semester during which I went to about a week of classes as the start of the semester and then no more, I was asked not to return. The big problem was that I didn't want to do any work, so I didn't go to class. The ostrich method of college was my technique, and it worked: soon I didn't have to go to college at all.
After that came time working for the family business (dreadful), a tour in the USMC (pretty good), more time working for the family business (soul killing, except for the reading), and then a move and change of career (pretty good). Things are so much better now than in my "young Bowling days", but I wish sometimes that I could have back those hours of focus. Though I realize (since I'm conservative) that life changes and some things do not come back. ¶ 11:13 1 comments
Friday, October 24, 2008
Coming Out For "Coming Up For Air"
My previous comment aside, I did enjoy the book. The elegy for a vanished England was beautiful, with just the right mix of realism (so I imagine) and sentimentality. The mix looked to be 95% to 5%, but there's no way for me to know since I don't know a great deal about late 19th and early 20th century England. I've read several biographies of Churchill, but he was on the other side of the tracks, so to speak. His recounting of a vanished rural England could be far more sentimental than I'm able to divine, but I'll give Orwell the benefit of the doubt since he was known for a clear-eyed appraisal of the world.
What made the book more pleasurable than I expected was that I didn't expect that kind of book from Orwell. I think of him as a writer of allegories, and of journalism. Coming Up For Air has elements of the latter, in the detailed recounting of life in Lower Binfield. The former element is also there and unmistakable, but since Lower Binfield's and Bowling's fate are presented as something which can't be prevented or brought back, it is a much more hopeless allegory than is Animal Farm.
Orwell is good at making the reader feel Bowling's loss and frustration. Added to his frustration was mine-after all, what could I do to prevent the industrialization of England? He makes one feel the way of life that slipped away. If I read a textbook about Pompeii, I might feel a very abstract pang of sympathy for those folks now immortalized in lava (obsidian?). Late 19th-early 20th-century England is much less foreign to me, but it's still a very far cry from anything I've experienced. Orwell does such a good job of narration that one can feel the change between 1914 and 1938.
The most jarring thing about the book were Orwell's acid comments about the impending war. I initially thought it was strange that someone who saw through to the truth of the Nazis and of Stalinism would write with such disdain for the character who Bowling knows is envisioning smashing the faces of Nazis with a pipe wrench during the entire time he is speaking. But I quickly realized that while Orwell likely did realize that war between Britain and Germany was inevitable, he also understood the atavism and misplaced enthusiasm driving the march to war (and also that the pipe wrench fellow was probably the mirror image of his imagined Nazi). He also understood what war did to all of the people living on the battlefield, and furthermore intuited correctly that in the new war the battlefield would be more or less everywhere. And just as WWI had, it would destroy the time in which Bowling was living, and accelerate the destruction of another span of time after the war. Bowling might not have liked 1938 relative to before 1914, but he really wasn't going to like post WWII England, should he survive to see it. There's also a solid dollop of dislike of militarism in general. It is Orwell, after all. It's too bad they don't make socialists like him anymore.
There might be another post coming about the mid-life crisis aspect of the book. ¶ 22:33 0 comments
What made the book more pleasurable than I expected was that I didn't expect that kind of book from Orwell. I think of him as a writer of allegories, and of journalism. Coming Up For Air has elements of the latter, in the detailed recounting of life in Lower Binfield. The former element is also there and unmistakable, but since Lower Binfield's and Bowling's fate are presented as something which can't be prevented or brought back, it is a much more hopeless allegory than is Animal Farm.
Orwell is good at making the reader feel Bowling's loss and frustration. Added to his frustration was mine-after all, what could I do to prevent the industrialization of England? He makes one feel the way of life that slipped away. If I read a textbook about Pompeii, I might feel a very abstract pang of sympathy for those folks now immortalized in lava (obsidian?). Late 19th-early 20th-century England is much less foreign to me, but it's still a very far cry from anything I've experienced. Orwell does such a good job of narration that one can feel the change between 1914 and 1938.
The most jarring thing about the book were Orwell's acid comments about the impending war. I initially thought it was strange that someone who saw through to the truth of the Nazis and of Stalinism would write with such disdain for the character who Bowling knows is envisioning smashing the faces of Nazis with a pipe wrench during the entire time he is speaking. But I quickly realized that while Orwell likely did realize that war between Britain and Germany was inevitable, he also understood the atavism and misplaced enthusiasm driving the march to war (and also that the pipe wrench fellow was probably the mirror image of his imagined Nazi). He also understood what war did to all of the people living on the battlefield, and furthermore intuited correctly that in the new war the battlefield would be more or less everywhere. And just as WWI had, it would destroy the time in which Bowling was living, and accelerate the destruction of another span of time after the war. Bowling might not have liked 1938 relative to before 1914, but he really wasn't going to like post WWII England, should he survive to see it. There's also a solid dollop of dislike of militarism in general. It is Orwell, after all. It's too bad they don't make socialists like him anymore.
There might be another post coming about the mid-life crisis aspect of the book. ¶ 22:33 0 comments
Sunday, October 19, 2008
"Coming Up For Air" by George Orwell
Thumbnail review: this would be an ideal book for a middle-aged man to have with him at the scene of his suicide. As for whether the book should or should not be coated with his brains and/or blood, that's a matter of taste.
I might have more to say about this book later, if I can muster it. Right now, I don't see how I'll be able to. ¶ 23:04 1 comments
I might have more to say about this book later, if I can muster it. Right now, I don't see how I'll be able to. ¶ 23:04 1 comments
Life In the Ruins
My values are basically Judeo-Christian, while I'm agnostic. Today the thought coalesced that this makes me, as Dalrymple noted in a different context, like those conquering barbarians who lived in the ruins they'd conquered, since they could do no better.
¶ 17:31 0 comments
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Perhaps It's Me
(see previous post)
I also have to accept that I may simply have a too cowlike, bourgeois view of the world, which is why their behavior sometimes shocks me. They have a zest which I do not.
[edited to place a "may" in the first sentence, which I thought I had when writing it originally. It's meaning changes somewhat with its inclusion.] ¶ 23:55 1 comments
I also have to accept that I may simply have a too cowlike, bourgeois view of the world, which is why their behavior sometimes shocks me. They have a zest which I do not.
[edited to place a "may" in the first sentence, which I thought I had when writing it originally. It's meaning changes somewhat with its inclusion.] ¶ 23:55 1 comments
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Older And Crankier
What do you do when you realize that you're beginning to hate most of your friends? By "friends", I don't really mean friends, I mean the co-workers whom you allow to masquerade as friends in your mind, since making new friends is hard, especially the older you get.
I attended a social function with these people last night, and while it was all cordial and even convivial, into it some of this new feeling seeped. While they are fun and usually engaging, I sense a meanness about them. This may be all in my head, and I don't mean that in a pro forma way, but they seem so sure of themselves and so smug in thinking that they are smarter (than who I'm not sure) and better than everyone else. That they are often self-deprecating doesn't erase that impression. After all, they're only being self-deprecating in comparing themselves unfavorably to their peer group, so I don't think that counts. There's something un-reflective in this smugness which makes it still more unattractive. As an example-and I know I risk being exposed as unfair, given the subject-last night one of them drunkenly disparaged "trickle down economics" while wholly missing the irony that this type of economic practice almost certainly made his nice six-figure salary possible. Politics aside, it just seemed stupidly nasty. After all, who is he really insulting? Given that it was apropos of nothing when he said it, was it just inchoate rage that had to bleed out somehow? This is a minor example which I've dwelt upon too long and gives the impression that this is outsized in my mind. It's only intended as a small example. But weight it all in your mind and make of it what you will-you'll probably have a clearer picture of it than I do.
What really bothers me is the impression that these people really hate those who they view as inferior. I mean, I've heard them occasionally mouth platitudes about equality and all that, but it mainly serves as cover for them to go on nastily disparaging all who don't hold the views of their herd. The hatred of those they view as stupid staggers me. They're all nice to me, of course, which is why I feel a little guilty and petty writing this. But I'm feeling less guilty and petty with each passing day. And that, I'm willing to admit, may be part and parcel of the hardening of me, and a growing unwarranted intolerance on my part. Perhaps I am being grossly unfair to them. But though I might think this through and decide that my take on them is wrong, it is probably too late for me to reverse course emotionally.
The worst part about it is that I don't really need them in the first place, so I'm both wasting my time and wrecking my view of them, perhaps unfairly, by socializing with them outside of work. But I'll probably get over it and go to the parties, having a beer while trying to steer the conversation to something "nice". That's not the worst part after all. The worst part is why can't I just go to things with these people and not think about this crap? Does it do me any good? Does it change anything? It's all so stupid. ¶ 23:27 0 comments
I attended a social function with these people last night, and while it was all cordial and even convivial, into it some of this new feeling seeped. While they are fun and usually engaging, I sense a meanness about them. This may be all in my head, and I don't mean that in a pro forma way, but they seem so sure of themselves and so smug in thinking that they are smarter (than who I'm not sure) and better than everyone else. That they are often self-deprecating doesn't erase that impression. After all, they're only being self-deprecating in comparing themselves unfavorably to their peer group, so I don't think that counts. There's something un-reflective in this smugness which makes it still more unattractive. As an example-and I know I risk being exposed as unfair, given the subject-last night one of them drunkenly disparaged "trickle down economics" while wholly missing the irony that this type of economic practice almost certainly made his nice six-figure salary possible. Politics aside, it just seemed stupidly nasty. After all, who is he really insulting? Given that it was apropos of nothing when he said it, was it just inchoate rage that had to bleed out somehow? This is a minor example which I've dwelt upon too long and gives the impression that this is outsized in my mind. It's only intended as a small example. But weight it all in your mind and make of it what you will-you'll probably have a clearer picture of it than I do.
What really bothers me is the impression that these people really hate those who they view as inferior. I mean, I've heard them occasionally mouth platitudes about equality and all that, but it mainly serves as cover for them to go on nastily disparaging all who don't hold the views of their herd. The hatred of those they view as stupid staggers me. They're all nice to me, of course, which is why I feel a little guilty and petty writing this. But I'm feeling less guilty and petty with each passing day. And that, I'm willing to admit, may be part and parcel of the hardening of me, and a growing unwarranted intolerance on my part. Perhaps I am being grossly unfair to them. But though I might think this through and decide that my take on them is wrong, it is probably too late for me to reverse course emotionally.
The worst part about it is that I don't really need them in the first place, so I'm both wasting my time and wrecking my view of them, perhaps unfairly, by socializing with them outside of work. But I'll probably get over it and go to the parties, having a beer while trying to steer the conversation to something "nice". That's not the worst part after all. The worst part is why can't I just go to things with these people and not think about this crap? Does it do me any good? Does it change anything? It's all so stupid. ¶ 23:27 0 comments
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
More Nicotine
After finding out that one didn't need a prescription for nicotine gum, I went out and bought some. I bought the 2mg/piece gum, "for those who smoke less than 25 cigarettes a day". Since I smoke zero cigarettes a day, these should do the job, and then some, I thought when buying them.
It wasn't as nasty as I'd been led to believe, at first. It did get progressively nastier the more I chewed it, but it was tolerable. Gauging the effect of the gum is more difficult. I felt OK, with no jitters or the high-pitched whine I hear in my ears when I've had too much nicotine, but neither was I sure that I'd gotten enough to give me the focused feeling I normally get after smoking a cigar. Experimentation is bound to yield the correct result, or kill me. ¶ 23:07 1 comments
It wasn't as nasty as I'd been led to believe, at first. It did get progressively nastier the more I chewed it, but it was tolerable. Gauging the effect of the gum is more difficult. I felt OK, with no jitters or the high-pitched whine I hear in my ears when I've had too much nicotine, but neither was I sure that I'd gotten enough to give me the focused feeling I normally get after smoking a cigar. Experimentation is bound to yield the correct result, or kill me. ¶ 23:07 1 comments
