late lunch

And along with that ice-cold bottle of grapefruit juice, I have some excellent beans to cook for lunch. The Pythagoreans would be appalled. As some of you may know, among the many rules of the Pythagorean order was an absolute injunction against eating beans (as well as meat). There are Pythagorean hymns denouncing beans. (Though it may have been Empedocles who said: “Wretched, wretched people, keep your hands away from beans!”)

I’ll do a Composition of Philosophy post just before sleeping. The early part of the work day was like pulling teeth, I’m afraid. But either that will have changed by the time I make my post, or if it persists, I may have some thoughts about how to deal with such days.

One problem is that I’ve already fallen into my usual summertime vice, which is to fall into an all-nighter schedule of a sort that no longer works well for me.

They say you tend to become more like your parents as you get older. Let’s make it even simpler by assuming that you tend to become more like your same-sex parent as you get older.

Am I developing in the same way that my father did? Largely so, I think. Since my parents had me very young, I have very clear memories of them from their 20’s (an age that seemed incomparably old and wise to me at the time).

With hindsight, I think my father in his 20’s was an intense and creative type with widely scattered energies, perhaps too scattered. But then I remember how in his 30’s he acquired an almost fanatical power of concentration, while gradually shifting toward an early-bird lifestyle that made a severe contrast with his previous late-night self (if you’re a semi-professional musician as he was for much of that time, there’s no escaping the late-night lifestyle).

I’ve seen those same things happen to me with age, and I also hope I continue to pick up more of the easy agreeableness that makes him almost universally popular with all age groups, from small children to the elderly. True, people have been saying this about me too since just about the time I moved to Cairo, but it’s still coming primarily from the outside. (As I’ve said before, it is a weird experience to be called “incredibly outgoing” by Egyptians, who are generally the most incredibly outgoing people I’ve met on this planet.) But it still doesn’t have that sense of convinced inner certainty that characterizes the most ingrained prejudices of our self-understanding.

But this is a wider and extremely interesting philosophical topic that ought to be explored some other time. There is still a prejudice that introspection is more accurate than our impressions of others, but that’s not necessarily true. Self-misunderstanding is probably rampant. And I’m willing to bet that we learn more about ourselves through feedback from the outside than from hours of introspection, assuming such a thing even exists.