Alan Jacobs

I read once that Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda, an Argentinian and a Chilean, a conservative and a Communist, formed a bond over the one thing they agreed on: English is the best language in which to write poetry because it has so many one-syllable words. How those native Spanish speakers envied all the one-syllable Anglo-Saxon words! 

I wrote a post a while back about the power of the monosyllabic, and I have a new example: “Seemed the Better Way,” from Leonard Cohen’s final album. (Yeah, I quoted the title song recently — I’m obsessed with the record right now.) 

Here are the lyrics: 

Seemed the better way
When first I heard him speak
Now it's much too late
To turn the other cheek

Sounded like the truth
Seemed the better way
Sounded like the truth
But it's not the truth today

I wonder what it was
I wonder what it meant
First he touched on love
Then he touched on death

Sounded like the truth
Seemed the better way
Sounded like the truth
But it's not the truth today

I better hold my tongue
I better take my place
Lift this glass of blood
Try to say the grace 

Ninety-six words, thirteen of which have two syllables; the rest are monosyllabic. Another way to count, removing repetition: The song uses fifty-one different words, four of which have two syllables. The spareness and simplicity of the language match the spareness and simplicity of the music: 

My friend Holly Fish made the above image for me. Call me indulgent, but I wrote today’s newsletter about my dog Malcolm. 

I loved WandaVision right up to the last episode, which except for a few wonderfully moving moments – the ones in which Wanda says goodbye to the world she had made – I disliked intensely. The last episode did not offer fan service, but rather franchise service: all that had gone before, all the weird juxtapositions of visual and narrative style that had made the series so fascinating, disappeared and we ended up with boss fights and the laying of groundwork for future movies and TV shows. It felt incredibly cynical, and cynical in a way that I’ve come to expect in the productions of the MCU. But I was more disappointed in this case than I would have been in others because the first few episodes had convinced me that here the MCU was doing something significantly different than it had ever done before. But nope, that was just a ruse. In the end they were what I thought they were.

At an especially important moment in Tim Keller’s lovely and honest essay about confronting death, The Atlantic neatly inserts this link to Ezekiel Emanuel’s essay about wanting to die at age 75. Oddly enough, though, if you visit Emanuel’s essay there’s no link to Keller’s.

UPDATE: Just to clarify, I don’t think the link placement was deliberate — I assume that these things are at least partly automated. The placement seemed ironic, that’s all.

We said goodbye to our best friend this morning after fourteen years of endlessly delightful companionship. Thanks for being you, Malcolm. We don’t know what we’ll do without you.

Damon Linker:

We have stopped believing in reason's power to persuade. The right thinks the critical social theories espoused by many on the left are both wrong and pernicious, but it doesn't expect to be able to convince the left of this view. Hence the move to use raw political or legal power to suppress it. The left, meanwhile, thinks many of those who don't share its premises are motivated by racism and other forms of bigotry that are in most cases untouchable by argument. Hence the move to use moral condemnation to get resisters excluded from social circles and cultural institutions in which they enjoy various forms of power and status.

These examples are themselves expressions of a broader trend we see all around us in our public life: the tendency to skip the work of attempting to change minds in favor of grabbing the power to control what's permitted. The clearest, and oldest example, of this move is the appeal to judges to resolve disputes that resist resolution through democratic deliberation and consensus-building. Instead of the right trying (and likely failing) to convince the rest of the country that the New Deal is a bad idea, it seeks to get the Supreme Court to declare the New Deal unconstitutional. Instead of the left trying (and likely failing) to convince the rest of the country that abortion should be legal, it seeks to get the Supreme Court to declare abortion a constitutionally protected right.

I don’t think this is quite right. The problem is not that many Americans have lost faith in the power to persuade; the problem is that they have lost the desire to persuade. An argument that would win over those people is not an argument worth making. Sweet it is to have enemies, and passing sweet to get them dragged on Twitter. 

As I wrote a while back, this is the triumph of the Manichaean Party in American politics. The last thing that party wants is unity; unity is loathsome to them. So to them I can only say: You want it darker.

I’m not sorry that I wrote a book called How to Think. It was worth doing. But it now seems to me that a more urgent task – ideally for someone wiser than I – would be to write a book that answers this question: Why Think?

UPDATE: Kevin Williamson makes a decisive point: "I do not think the United States is headed toward a civil war — civil wars are too much work. But it does matter that the dominant American political fantasy of our time is a dream of civil war. The mass arrests dreamt up by Q and the massacres envisioned by its rivals may be exercises in wishful thinking, but what Americans are wishing for matters.” 

This by Oliver Burkeman is exactly right:

The confused public conversation about [Jordan] Peterson arises, if you ask me, from the fact that there are two main kinds of suffering. There is the kind that results from power disparities between groups: racism, sexism, economic inequality. Then there is the universal kind that comes with being a finite human, faced with a limited lifespan, the inevitability of death, the unavoidability of grief and regret, the inability to control the present or predict the future and the impossibility of ever fully knowing even those to whom we’re closest. Modern progressives rightly focus much energy on the first kind of suffering. But we increasingly talk as if the second kind barely counts, or doesn’t even exist – as if everything that truly matters were ultimately political. Peterson, by contrast, takes the second sort of suffering very seriously indeed.

Malcolm has become increasingly contemplative in his old age.

My newsletter seems not to have gone out this morning, so while I’m trying to find out what went wrong you can see the issue here.