Alan Jacobs

Freddie might be indulging in a bit of exaggeration for rhetorical effect here, responding to the “discourse of exhaustion”:

Listen. Listen to me and understand: you are exhausted because your species was a mistake. You are exhausted because life is pain. You are exhausted because for 200,000 years we evolved to run the plains like the wild animals we were, our social circles 10 or 12 people at most, and now our conditions have changed so quickly that evolution can’t keep up, so we sift through our thousands of human connections spellbound by the impossibility of maintaining them all as we sit in our cramped and sterile apartments in crowded cities that were never meant to exist. Once we were animals. Now we are something much worse.

Let’s grant, per argumentum, that all this is true. It nevertheless is also true that I have never been as tired at the end of a school year as I am right now. Covidtide has been distinctively challenging for many of us, it just has, though I don’t claim to have a full understanding of all aspects of the phenomenon.

One of the small comforts of the past year has been reading the blog of Ada Palmer, a science-fiction writer and historian of the Renaissance who also deals with chronic debilitating illness, and in the course of learning how to deal with her symptoms has learned a few things that might be helpful to the rest of us.

Among other things, dealing with occasional incapacity has made her attentive to elements of the historical record that others might pass over. She especially notices all the quotidian things that stand between us and what we want to do, what to be. For instance, in a transcript of a talk, this reflection on Michelangelo:

In his autobiography he’s talking about this lawsuit that arose because of the della Rovere tomb project, in great detail, and then there’s a line that says Michelangelo realized that, while dealing with a bunch of lawsuits and Pope Adrian and such, he’d been so stressed he hadn’t picked up a chisel in four years. Because he spent the entire time just dealing with the lawsuit. (Anyone feeling guilty about being overwhelmed by stress this year, you’re not alone!) And we have four years worth of lost Michelangelo production, because he didn’t do any art that entire time, because he was just dealing with a stupid lawsuit. And that’s not the sort of thing that fits into our usual way of thinking about these great historical figures. We imagine Michelangelo in his studio with a chisel. We do not imagine him in a room with a bunch of lawyers being curmudgeonly and bickering and trapped in contract hell.

And then — more directly connected to our moment — a comment on Isaac Newton:

Early in the pandemic the anecdote went viral that Isaac Newton came up with his theory of gravity while he was quarantining in the country from a plague, and many people (not jokingly enough) used it to say we should have high standards for what we produce in a pandemic, or that if we don’t set high standards it means we’re not geniuses like him. The true fact (historian here, this is my period!) is that Newton did theorize gravity while quarantining, but didn’t have library access, and while he was testing the theory he didn’t have some of the constants he needed (sizes, masses), so he tried to work from memory, got one wrong, did all the math, and concluded that he was wrong and the gravity + ellipses thing didn’t work. He stuck it in a drawer. It was only years later when a friend asked him about Kepler’s ellipses that he pulled the old notes back out of the drawer to show the friend, and the friend spotted the error, they redid the math, and then developed the theory of gravity. Together, with full library access, when things were normal after the pandemic. During the pandemic nobody could work properly, including him. So if anyone pushes the claim that we should all be writing brilliant books during this internationally recognized global health epidemic, just tell them Newton too might have developed gravity years earlier if not for his pandemic.

If you’be been able to be as chipper and as productive in this past year as you normally are, consider yourself blessed. I sure as hell haven’t managed it.

Very few sites on the internet are meant to facilitate reading — most are, in fact, designed to inhibit reading. Imagine watching a movie and having the image regularly shrink to a tiny size, overwhelmed by a much larger advertisement which also plays its sound at double the volume of the movie’s sound — that’s what reading a corporate site is usually like. (I hope you will have noticed that I try to make this blog easily readable on large and small screens alike. Also, perhaps, that I have recently added a button to enable dark mode.)

So what to do? Well, most browsers now offer some kind of reading mode, which helps a lot — though I have not found one that works on every site. Or you could use a read-it-later service like Instapaper or Pocket. I do these things. 

Sometimes, though, I come across a long story or article or essay that I want to read without any of the distractions of being online. In that case I choose one of the following options: 

(1) If simply attentive reading is the goal, I often use a service called Push to Kindle. It does a superb job of converting webpages so that they’re perfectly formatted for the Kindle. For instance, someone recently recommended to me a long SF story called “Folding Beijing” — that’s a perfect candidate for Push to Kindle. I downloaded it and will probably read it in the next day or two. When anything is over 2500 words or so I get really uncomfortable reading it on my computer, so I often use this service for the lengthy reviews in the London Review of Books — to which I subscribe, but the print in the paper edition is uncomfortably small for my aging eyes — and their extended analytical essays like Perry Anderson’s three recent reflections on the European Union — totaling 45,000 words, longer than my most recent book — are also best-suited for the Kindle. 

(I’m trying not to buy anything else from Amazon, but I continue to use what I’ve already bought, putting off the Day of Decision until my current Kindle dies.) 

(2) But if I need to interact significantly with the text — highlight and underline — then I use a different service, Print Friendly. It converts webpages to PDFs that can be saved and/or printed. I use this all the time when I want to make PDFs to send to my students, or when a post really demands critical attention. Example: Ada Palmer’s long post from last year on the ways in which the Renaissance was worse than the Middle Ages. 

There’s a lot of great stuff on the internet. Not much of it is presented in ways designed for serious reading. But as you can see, that’s a problem that can be addressed. 

Recently I wrote a post for the Hedgehog Review on the Substackification of journalism and whether it marks a permanent atomization of journalistic writing or whether it could be the seed of institutional renewal. Here are a couple of relevant data points: 

• On his Substack newsletter, Scott Alexander has been running book reviews by his readers. 
• On her Substack newsletter, Bari Weiss has been publishing essays by other writers, and explains that practice thus: "My goal is not to make a living publishing only my views —  or ones that conform exactly to my worldview —  on this Substack. (Trust me, it’d get boring.) My ultimate goal is far more ambitious. I want to run the most interesting opinion page in America, filled with fresh reporting and commentary.” 

Substack began as a way of highlighting distinctive individual voices; it’s already turning into something more collaborative. 

Kleos means both “glory” or “fame” and also “the song that ensures that glory or fame.” The noun is cognate with the Homeric verb kluō, meaning “I hear.” Kleos is sometimes translated as “acoustic renown” — the spreading renown you get from talking about your exploits.^* It’s a bit like having a large Twitter following. In the Homeric version of the Ethos of the Extraordinary … to live a life worth living was to live a kleos-worthy life, a song-worthy life. Being sung, having one’s life spoken about, your story vivid in others’ heads, is what gives your life an added substance. It’s almost as if, in being vividly apprehended by others, you’re living simultaneously in their representations of you, acquiring additional lives to add to your meager one.

The Ethos of the Extraordinary answered that all that a person can do is to enlarge that life by the only means we have, striving to make of it a thing worth the telling, a thing that will have an impact on other minds, so that, being replicated there, it will take on a moreness. Kleos. Live so that others will hear of you. Paltry as it is, it’s the only way we have to beat back uncaring time. 

Our own culture of Facebook’s Likes and Twitter followings should put us in a good position to sympathize with an insistence on the social aspect of life-worthiness. Perhaps it’s a natural direction toward which a culture will drift, once the religious answers lose their grip. The ancient Greeks lived before the monotheistic solution took hold of Western culture, and we — or a great many of us — live after. A major difference between our two cultures is that, for the ancient Greeks, who lacked our social media, the only way to achieve such mass duplication of the details of one’s life in the apprehension of others was to do something wondrously worth the telling. Our wondrous technologies might just save us all the personal bother. Kleos is a tweet away. 

— Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex 

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^{* “Though the gods are incessantly mentioned [in Pindar’s poems], this ethos presents a life worth living in terms that are drawn far more from the world of men. What is desired is not the attention of the immortals, but rather the attention of one’s fellow mortals. The gods come prominently into the picture because they either promote or prevent this good — that is, the achievement that brings fame — from being attained, but the good itself isn’t defined in terms of the gods. The good belongs to the world of mortals; it’s their attention and acclaim one is after.” – RNG↩}

This is the sort of thing the world needs more of. Matthew Sweet saw a tweet claiming that a peer-reviewed study from a Stanford University scholar proved that face masks do nothing to prevent the spread of COVID-19. So he followed up, and learned that 

1. It was not a peer-reviewed study; 
2. The author is not associated with Stanford University or any other institution; 
3. None of the evidence it cites supports the claim about the uselessness of masks.

Of course, Sweet’s demonstration is unlikely to make a dent in typical online behavior; shitposters gonna shitpost. But it’s a great example of how much you can learn if you just take the time to follow the links. Intellectual hygiene requires that we repeat this mantra: Don’t trust, verify. 

Here’s my suggestion: Assume that everything everyone says on social media in the first 72 hours after a news event is the product of temporary insanity or is a side-effect of a psychotropic drug. Write it off. Pretend it never happened. Only pay attention to what they say when three days have passed since the precipitating event.