People sometimes ask me why I care. “Why do you care if a 38-year-old woman has a Squishmallow collection?” “Why do you care if a grown man cries over finally deciding on his Hogwarts House?” And I admit that this is a good-faith question. There are many things I don’t care about. If you’re not hurting anyone, if your regression is private, if you want to let your inner child out to play on weekends, go with God. But when the collective orientation of a society shifts away from maturity, and when entire media ecosystems are devoted to protecting people from the experience of being challenged or confronted, we don’t just lose some abstract dignity. We lose the capacity to solve real problems. Adults who refuse to be adults leave no adults to run the world. And somebody has to.
I wrote a post on viewpoint diversity in the university.
Post-hose happiness. That tongue!
This is a good season to re-read Thomas Pynchon’s 1984 essay on Luddites.
Working on a biography of Dorothy L. Sayers, I am regularly amazed that she could turn in a typescript of a novel and then hold the book in her hands six weeks later. Book publishers worked fast in those days, and largely mechanically: typewriters, Linotype, Monotype, letterpress printing. Zoom!
What if the chatbots just enter a state of transcendent bliss and end up ignoring us altogether? That’s a win/win, right?
The people at Fonts In Use are choosing the path of righteousness
Speaking of Robertson Davies: I only like seven or eight of the dozens and dozens of essays I have published, but one of those is largely about Davies.
I wrote about the physical counterpart of Lord Peter Wimsey … and some of his pupils.
Honored to be in my buddy Austin Kleon’s newsletter this morning. Me and Tolstoy.
Italo Calvino (1983):
I belong to that portion of humanity — a minority on the planetary scale but a majority I think among my public — that spends a large part of its waking hours in a special world, a world made up of horizontal lines where the words follow one another one at a time, where every sentence and every paragraph occupies its set place: a world that can be very rich, maybe even richer than the nonwritten one, but that requires me to make a special adjustment to situate myself in it. When I leave the written world to find my place in the other, in what we usually call the world, made up of three dimensions and five senses, populated by billions of our kind, that to me is equivalent every time to repeating the trauma of birth, giving the shape of intelligible reality to a set of confused sensations, and choosing a strategy for confronting the unexpected without being destroyed.
When you express concern about any new social or technological development, people will show up shouting “Moral panic!” But that’s not an idea, it’s a spell: they’re trying to banish bad thoughts. It’s a form of apotropaic magic, and it’s one of the chief activities on social media.
I discovered that the initial trauma of Arthur’s death was the coded cypher through which God spoke, and that God had less to do with faith or belief, and more to do with a way of seeing. I came to understand that God was a form of perception, a means of being alert to the poetic resonance of being. I found God to be woven into all things, even the greatest evils and our deepest despair. Sometimes I feel the world pulsating with a rich, lyrical energy, at other times it feels flat, void, and malevolent. I came to realise that God was present and active in both experiences.
Adam Mars-Jones: “Children’s books revisited in later life may disappoint, but they are immune to the embarrassment associated with outgrown toys. Even if their colours have faded, they expanded the world in a way toys can’t match.”