speaking of age

The fact of Nimoy being, incredibly, 79 years old, got me thinking. It’s a commonplace observation now, but perhaps not yet fully explored: the healthy functioning of people into later years than previously.

I thought of this again while reading one of Wilson’s essays where he’s speaking with weary resignation about how the younger generation will have to do something because he’s no longer capable of such nimble mental adaptation. And then I checked, and he was only 48 at the time he wrote it.

A few years ago I ran across a systematic study of this phenomenon by some sociologists or psychologists or whatever they were. Their conclusion was that, at least in the intellectual professions, we all reach maturity about 10 years later than a century ago. That sounded plausible, when you go back and see lots of people doing things in their late 20’s that would be nearly impossible to do at that age now.

But they also added an unexpected twist to this verdict, which is that we are not compensated for the 10-year delay by an additional 10 years of productivity on the other end. Their hypothesis is that there is simply more material to master now, and that’s why it takes 10 years longer to “grow up” intellectually.

I’m not so sure about that, and I have my own theory. My theory is that people grow up as fast as they need to, and that increased longevity of our elders simply means that we don’t need to leave the extended adolescence that now passes for early adulthood in the intellectual classes.

In other words, if you’re handed a big plate of adult responsibilities at 25, I think you can probably adjust to it even in our own time. But most likely you won’t be handed such a plate, because there will be plenty of people a bit older than you who will be handed it first. If you were made a university professor at 24 like in olden times, you’d probably start acting like a professor at 24. But in our era you won’t be finished with your studies by then, and any hiring committee would be very suspicious of you.

So, I think it’s less a matter of “more material to be mastered” (after all, the canon of what needs to be studied is trimmed as often as it’s augmented), and more that there aren’t “grownup” slots to fill in the world at a young age anymore, at least not in the professions followed by most readers of this blog.

But I also have some contrary intuitions that run counter to this one, so it’s not my final word on the subject. One of the few philosophers that’s had much of interest on the topic is Schopenhauer in his “The Ages of Life.” The funniest advice in that essay is to make sure to live to age 60, because by then all pretenses are gone and everyone is unmasked, as if at the end of a costume ball, and you will finally see who you’ve been dealing with all this time.

Help me, Spock!

Leonard Nimoy has a ONE-MAN PHOTOGRAPHY SHOW open in Massachusetts.

Good for him, though it must be impossible to live the majority of your adult life after having played Spock. It doesn’t seem to be the sort of past that allows for maximum flexibility of life change afterward.

He looks pretty good for 79 years old, don’t you think?

Wilson on Chapman

I really enjoyed Wilson’s telling of the story of John Jay Chapman, the powerful essayist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist scourge, brief political ally of Theodore Roosevelt, and eventual translator of Dante. While there’s something a bit terrifying about his form of honesty and his impulsive actions, one tends to agree with Wilson: “‘Yes,’ we say to ourselves in our amazement, ‘people ought to be more like this!'”

The most disturbing but fascinating story involves Chapman’s left hand and his marriage (the two are linked). As a law student at Harvard, Chapman met a young half-Italian woman named Minna. They spent the winter reading Dante together, and seem to have fallen in love, though it was never spoken and Chapman never consciously realized it.

Eventually he noticed that Minna was troubled by something. Rather than thinking that he might have been the cause of it, he bizarrely concluded that a mutual male acquaintance of theirs was trifling with her affections. At a harmless house party where Chapman and the other man were both present, he invited the man outside on some pretext, and beat him severely without warning. (Chapman was large and powerfully built.)

He went home to his apartment in Cambridge. Apparently in shame at what he had done, he shoved his left hand into a coal-burning stove, and used his right hand to hold it there for several minutes. When he withdrew his left hand, it was blackened to ash, and the knuckle bones were visible. He decided to go to the hospital in Boston. There he was anesthetized and the hand was amputated. When he woke up, another doctor was there and asked him if he was insane. “That’s for you to decide,” said Chapman.

He then wrote to Minna discussing the incident. They did get married, though she inexplicably died about 10 years later while he was reading aloud to her.

I don’t remember a more unusual love story in literary history. Maybe not one to emulate, but there’s a definition fascination to it.

William James on Chapman: “He just looks at things and tells the truth about them— a strange thing even to try to do, and he doesn’t always succeed.”

a couple of anniversaries coming up

July 31 will be the 25th anniversary of the day I purchased Being and Time, a story already told in my interview with Paul Ennis. Obviously, trumpet blasts do not sound at such moments while they occur. But as you look back over your life and realize that a handful of moments set you on a specific and unalterable course, those moments are entirely worthy of the trumpets while you remember them.

It’s a nice memory… I’d just cashed my check from one of those horrible weeks of detasseling corn, which you just have to do a few times if you grow up in Iowa. (I think I did it three years in all.) But it’s also quite awful work: muddy fields, mosquitoes, heat, and pesticide; one year I was even threatened by a group of rednecks wearing John Deere baseball caps, which sounds like a good plot for a horror story. The payoff is that it’s a lot of money for a high school kid once you’re finished. It’s also one of those “Midwestern Protestant work ethic” things, and some of my friends in other societies (such as Egypt) have reacted with horror and/or dismay that I ever did such a thing in my life.

In any case, I had my big check from Pioneer or Northrup King, whichever company I was contracted with; Pioneer, I believe. I was down in Iowa City, because we were helping my grandparents vacuum their house which they had just sold for their impending move to Kansas City. I took a break and walked a few blocks into town. The money was burning a hole in my pocket, I’d noticed that copy of Being and Time on a few occasions, and it looked like such a serious, systematic piece of work that if one could understand it, one could understand philosophy. So I bought it. I can still remember the intimidating difficulty of the book at first touch as though it were yesterday. (Now, I think it’s one of the simplest books ever written in philosophy, but it took about 7 years of work to see that.)

On to the next anniversary… August 1 will be the 10th anniversary of my departure for Egypt, though of course I didn’t arrive until the 2nd. I won’t be here to celebrate, though, since I’ll already be in Paris.

My first impression of Cairo was: Mexico City. And they do have some things in common. But Mexico City is surrounded by mountains, and it’s also not very safe. Cairo, by contrast, is the safest largest city by far that I’ve ever visited. In any American city, you have an outside chance of being killed at random just for standing in a convenience store at the wrong time. If you’re traveling in India, a great place, you have an outside chance of becoming the victim of some horrendous criminal incident, and you always have to be on your guard for that. But in Egypt, you’re pretty much safe from any of that. Bad things can happen anywhere, but they happen here a lot less than usual. (I’m talking here about crime. Traffic is another story entirely. In Egypt, you do very much have a realistic chance of becoming the victim of a horrendously stupid traffic accident.)

I also remember walking around Zamalek the first day and getting lost, which seems pretty funny now, although one’s compass directions on the island can still be messed up even after many years here: many things feel like straight lines that aren’t straight at all.

And I also remember what seemed like an extremely brave act at the time, which was walking from Zamalek down to the old AUC campus: brave because I had no idea where I was going, didn’t know a soul in the city yet, and had never been anywhere close to Egypt before that day. Now it’s a relatively harmless, brisk 45-minute walk. But at the time it was a long, adventurous path filled with bizarreness on every block.

That breeze coming down the Nile as you cross the bridge, though… I felt that the first night, and it never gets old.

Erich Luna on McLuhan and OOO

It’s in Spanish, but if you can’t read Spanish or struggle through it, you can at least enjoy the excerpts in English from various blogs as well as the nice photos of McLuhan.

Erich is also based in Lima, Peru. As I’ve said before, it’s a city that gave an impression of intellectual vitality when I was there (in January 2004).

The cliffs over the sea are beautiful in Lima. The whole city is on a cliff, really, and the Pacific Ocean crashes below.

Marshall McLuhan y la ontología orientada a objetos (OOO)

rhetoric

LEVI LINKED to Scot Barnett’s REVIEW of Tool-Being and Guerrilla Metaphysics. I commented briefly at Larval Subjects but should do so again here.

I can’t claim to have been following the whole of recent philosophical developments in the rhetoric/composition field, but I do know there have been interesting things going on.

In the past, any mention of “rhetoric” in the vicinity of continental philosophy generally had an anti-realist agenda. It was about speech acts, performativity, anti-essentialism, and so forth.

Even in Aristotle, who is so masterful in his treatment of the enthymeme, it’s a “people thing”: rhetoric is a matter of human moods. And that’s the direction in which Heidegger continues to take it— rhetoric as a matter of Dasein’s everydayness.

My own key to escaping that standpoint was McLuhan, for whom rhetoric is not a matter of human moods at all, but of the total environmental background that is so much deeper than any distracting content that fixes our gaze.

But I’m going to wait and see what the rhetoric pros are going to do with all of this, because they’ve already said some things that wouldn’t have occurred to me.

fool, or deliberate troublemaker?

What kind of dolt or miscreant wears a LeBron James Miami jersey to a baseball game in Cleveland? That city is traumatized and enraged.

CLEVELAND — A fan wearing a Miami Heat jersey of LeBron James drew the ire of the crowd at a Cleveland Indians game and was escorted out of the ballpark.

Fans in the left-field bleachers chanted obscenities and pointed at the man Wednesday night during the sixth inning of the game between the Indians and New York Yankees. Hundreds of fans joined in before security led the man out of Progressive Field.

As he left, some fans followed him toward the gate with more derisive chants.

Ansel Adams, Part Two

Now there is CONTROVERSY heating up over the supposed discovery of the early Ansel Adams negatives, with the administrators of his trust calling it a scam, and the owner of the negatives and his team fighting back.

Forgeries do sometimes work, in fact. Below is Han van Meegeren’s bogus “Vermeer” painting, which fooled even the specialists. I believe one of them called it “Vermeer’s greatest masterpiece,” which must have been humiliating in retrospect once the scam was exposed.

If I’m remembering the story correctly, the only reason van Meegeren’s forgeries were detected is that he was in serious trouble (with a possible death sentence) for selling “Dutch national cultural treasures” to Hermann Goering during the war, and the only way he could get out of it was by admitting that he had scammed Goering rather than selling him genuine treasures (and then proving it, I believe, by demonstrating his forgery technique to the authorities). One of the things he did was buy undistinguished paintings from Vermeer’s era, then scrape them clean and paint his own forgeries on top of those genuine pieces of period canvas.

a simple tip

Here’s a quick new advice post.

Sometimes if you’re feeling stalled, and you have a lot on your plate, you will find it’s because you have a weird prejudice about the order in which things should be done.

Let’s say you have 5 small to medium projects you need to finish before the end of December (I think my number is more like 7, but close enough). If you go for about a week or so just spinning your wheels, in most cases it will be because you have an unspoken commitment to doing project #1 first, and it isn’t happening yet for some reason.

In those cases, ask yourself which one you really feel like doing at the moment. Maybe it’s project #4. Well, start working on #4. Anything to give you momentum and keep up your morale. Those are the two keys.

Momentum is always crucial in any intellectual pursuit. Turn your attention to whatever you are currently in the mood to do quickly. Not only will it knock off one of your obligations, but it may also shed indirect light on the other projects.

Wilson as the anti-energysucker

Edmund Wilson refers to the literary critic and winetaster George Saintsbury as being similar to peanuts: you check in for a little snack, but then you find you can’t stop eating.

As my recent posts probably indicate, I feel the same way about Wilson himself. If you’ve just enjoyed one of his 11-page articles, then hey, there’s probably enough time for one of the 9-pagers. And now what the heck, I may as well see what he says about Thackeray’s letters in 4 pages before getting back to work.

One of the reasons I find his essays so addictive is precisely because he is the anti-energysucker. Even when he attacks authors, he somehow makes them more interesting than they were before. After about 600 pages of Wilson, I feel like stopping time in its tracks and hanging out in the library for a month and reading stuff like Van Wyck Brooks on Washington Irving or A.E. Housman’s polemics against bad classicists. His enthusiasm is contagious.

Who is the greatest American literary critic of all time? Many would give Wilson the prize, though I think Poe is pretty tough to beat. (And I think Wilson would agree with me there.)

In fact, if Poe wasn’t the most interesting periodical writer of all time, then I’m not sure who was. His ability to keep his audience entertained was inexhaustible, and remember: his entire corpus was crammed into a short life of just 40 years. Handwriting analysis. Code-cracking. Insightful analyses of literary work. A bit of New York literary gossip.

If Poe had lived a normal lifespan then he would have ended up as the leading author of the Confederacy, for sure. His sympathies were always South, even though he was born in Boston.

Poe was born exactly 24 days before Abraham Lincoln. Not a bad one-month stretch in U.S. history. Heck, even in purely literary terms Lincoln is one of the best American prose writers, and Poe is one of the others.