Isaac Greene:

Part way through the first movement of Bach I played, it happened. It’s happened before, but it doesn’t happen every concert. I could feel the energy of everyone in the room listening to the same sound and entering the music with me. When that happens, it’s almost as if you become a spectator too, hearing the music through the ears of everyone else. A 300-year-old piece of music I’ve played for almost twenty years was brand new, as vivid and alive as the day Bach wrote it down. Like a Bob Dylan song says: “every one of them [notes] rang true and glowed like burning coal, pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.”

It is a sacred moment.

Bede Griffiths (quoted in Taylor’s A Secular Age, in the same opening discussion as that other quote):

One day during my last term at school I walked out alone in the evening and heard the birds singing in that full chorus of song, which can only be heard at that time of the year at dawn or at sunset. I remember now the shock of surprise with which the sound broke on my ears. It seemed to me that I had never heard the birds singing before and I wondered whether they sang like this all year round and I had never noticed it. As I walked I came upon some hawthorn trees in full bloom and again I thought that I had never seen such a sight or experienced such sweetness before. If I had been brought suddenly among the trees of the Garden of Paradise and heard a choir of angels singing I could not have been more surprised. I came then to where the sun was setting over the playing fields. A lark rose suddenly from the ground beside the tree where I was standing and poured out its song above my head, and then sank still singing to rest. Everything then grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth. I remember now the feeling of awe which came over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God.

Vaclav Havel, June 19, 1982*:

Again, I call to mind that distant moment in Heřmanice when on a hot, cloudless summer day, I sat on a pile of rusty iron and gazed into the crown of an enormous tree that stretched, with dignified repose, up and over all the fences, wires, bars and watchtowers that separated me from it. As I watched the imperceptible trembling of its leaves against an endless sky, I was overcome by a sensation that is difficult to describe: all at once, I seemed to rise above all the coordinates of my momentary existence in the world into a kind of state outside time in which all the beautiful things I had ever seen and experienced existed in a total “co-present”; I felt a sense of reconciliation, indeed of an almost gentle consent to the inevitable course of things as revealed to me now, and this combined with a carefree determination to face what had to be faced. A profound amazement at the sovereignty of Being became a dizzying sensation of tumbling endlessly into the abyss of its mystery; an unbounded joy at being alive, at having been given the chance to live through all I have lived through, and at the fact that everything has a deep and obvious meaning—this joy formed a strange alliance in me with a vague horror at the inapprehensibility and unattainability of everything I was so close to in that moment, standing at the very “edge of the finite”; I was flooded with a sense of ultimate happiness and harmony with the world and myself, with that moment, with all the moments I could call up, and with everything invisible that lies behind it and which has meaning. I would even say that I was somehow “struck by love,” though I don’t know precisely for whom or what. Once, in one of my letters, I reflected upon this experience; now I think—at least in the perspective of these essays—that I understand it better.

Evidently there exists an experience in which the longing of separated Being for remerging with the integrity of Being is satisfied, as it were, in the most mature and complete manner. That experience is typically and most profoundly human: it is the experience of meaning, and of meaningfulness. The need for meaning and the search for it—regardless of their form, their strength or their depth, or how definite or indefinite they may be, though they be nothing more than a vague sensation of the absence of “something” without which life is worthless—accompany the human “I” from its beginning right through to its end. They are inseparable and its most important dimension (because it embraces all the rest), its maturest and most complete expression, and the instrument of its self-constitution. Perhaps it could be said that the “I” is, in fact, this search for meaning—the meaning of things, events, its own life, itself. Certainly this dimension of its longing for “Being in Being,” or rather this aspect of its thrownness into its source in Being, is somehow the “last” to come to light: it is something more than just the spontaneous intention of the “pre-I,” in which there are still echoes of the “prenatal” state of nonseparation; it is even something more than the vigorous effort of the mind to grasp Being by perceiving and throwing light on it; these intentions are, of course, present in the “I,” but they do not explain it entirely: it transcends them—by virtue, for example, of how it contains them within itself, mutually increases their strength and consummates them: paradoxically, the “I” seeks fullness of participation, but an alert participation, one that already knows of itself; it seeks a totality of merging, but a totality—so to speak—that is fully aware of its own unrealizability.

The experience of meaning is thus, essentially, the maturest or “highest” form of the “I” ‘s quasi-identification with the integrity of Being. It is the experience of genuine “contact,” but contact as something both autonomous and integral—paradoxical as that may be. Perhaps it might be described as the experience of “counterpoint” between the “voice of Being” in the “I” (in its source) and the “voice of Being” in the “non-l” (in the world), wherein the meaning of this counterpoint does not just lie in a harmony that amplifies the original quality, but in the new quality it brings, a quality that knows neither of the two intersecting voices. It is in this counterpoint that it first seems possible (if only for a fleeting moment) to hear a suggestion or an echo of the as yet unfamiliar theme from the symphony of Being. The semipresence of Being in the “I” and its hidden presence in the “non-I” encounter each other here for an instant as “insight,” a joyous sensation of participation and the vertigo that comes with it. The reflection of Being in the “I” renders us open to the mystery of Being in the “non-l”; Being concealed in the world, or the Being of the world, opens itself up to us. It is a meeting of two opennesses—but opennesses that are directed exclusively toward each other: it is not just that we seem to be here because of Being, but that Being seems to be here because of us. The greatest attainable closeness, fullness and completeness of Being would therefore seem to call forth the greatest degree of fullness and completeness of the “I.”

Perhaps it will now be clear why I link the experience of meaning with what I called the third paradox of our thrownnesses: the nearest we can come to the fullness of Being also gives us the clearest indication of how unattainable it is; the most mature identification is most powerfully revealed as quasi-identification. Joy has an undertone of horror, tranquillity of anxiety, good fortune a touch of the fatally tragic. This experience reveals to us that in complete and unlimited identification, total insight, utter happiness, lies the end of the “I,” death. It is by no means accidental that at the very heights of meaningfulness, happiness, joy and love, the specter of death inevitably appears with particular clarity. The experience of meaning also differs from less mature expressions of our longing for Being in that it contains within it—while at the same time, oddly enough, losing nothing of that sense of supreme happiness—the most forceful awareness of futility. But is it not precisely this that brings it closest to the contradictory essence itself of human life and the human mission?

Being spellbound within me and Being spellbound within the world can join hands anytime, anywhere and in any way: when I look into the crown of a tree or into someone’s eyes, when I succeed in writing you a good letter, when I am moved by an opera on television, when a passage from Levinas sets my thoughts swirling, when our visits work out, when I understand the meaning of my compassion for the weather-woman, when I help someone or when someone helps me, when something important happens, or when nothing in particular happens at all. But whenever and however it happens, such moments tend to be rare and fleeting. Given the contradictory nature of separated Being, it can’t be any other way and it is right that it should be so: after all, the uniqueness and the unpredictability of such moments combine to create their meaning: it is the meaning of “islands of meaning” in the ocean of our struggling, the meaning of lanterns whose light is cast into the darkness of our life’s journey, illuminating all the many meanings of its direction.

* A portion of this is also quoted in Taylor’s Cosmic Connections, but I find the whole letter is worth quoting. For another sample, see this one from August 21, 1982 that I posted last year. I want to say a lot more about these letters, particularly the last 16 of them which Havel intended to be read together. In fact, after his release they were originally published together in samizdat form. Regardless of whether or not I get around to it, I think the one from August 21st, the third to last of the 16, is a good summary. And quite frankly, I think it summarizes, or gets at, very nearly everything — from the general malaise to the political unrest to the global birth rate crisis — pretty well.

Jack Goldsmith:

There is a large, difficult question about how the next Democratic administration should think about accountability for the endless executive branch abuses and rampant illegality that have permeated the Trump administration. The forms of abuse and illegality have been so broad-based that it is hard to know where to start or how to proceed. There is also a large and difficult question about how the next Democratic administration will use all of the many tools of the weaponizing unitary executive that it will inherit from Trump against its Trumpian enemies, and what new tools it might wield.

And then there is the fact that what looks like accountability in one bubble looks like weaponization in another.

[…]

There is a growing element in the Democratic Party that wants to go much harder next time. Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, for example, said in February that Democrats once in power would punish the companies and institutions that have collaborated with Trump. “If these corporations think that the Democrats, when they come back in power, are going to play by the old rules…they’ve got another thing coming,” she said. “This is not going to be an instance of forgive and forget. It’s not going to end well for them.” She added: “Democrats have had a belly full, and we’re not going to play by the old set of rules… but we’re not going to be suckers.” Rice and those who share her view surely would apply this logic to “collaborators” inside the administration. […]

I understand but do not share Rice’s view. I believe accountability for Trump 2.0 should focus first and primarily on transparency, i.e., figuring out what happened, not just in Trump’s abuses of government, but also in his and his family’s extraordinarily corrupt financial aggrandizement—and yes, that includes finding out who enabled, and benefited from, all of these things, and how.

[…]

Despite the obvious hypocrisy in the Republican remarks, many on the Trump side really believe that the Democrats are just as bad, if not much worse, because they sought to decapitate Trump in his first term and to keep him off the ballot or weaken him considerably through lawfare in 2024.

[…]

I don’t have prescriptions. There were very good reasons for the long-standing norm of not prosecuting high-level political rivals or using overt legal tools to damage and try to block a presidential candidate in an election year. Democrats broke that norm, which they believed was justified by Trump’s horrific actions. And they further believed that the norm brought its own costs in allowing a law-indifferent and abusive president to not be held to account. The Trump side saw this all as norm-busting and in bad faith.

Trump won the election and could have stopped the cycle. But that was contrary to his vengeful nature and, in any event, would have been seen by his side as unilateral disarmament. And so he engaged in astonishingly harsh and broad retaliation for what the Biden administration did, in order to deter rivals on many dimensions. The Democrats are now contemplating whether and how to respond when they gain power. The incentive for brutal retaliation will be overwhelming, especially since it will be argued, just as Vance argued, that the other side has already done it, will do it again if possible, and thus must be maximally deterred.

And so on.

It’s a bleak future.

Vaclav Havel, from Heřmanice prison, June 26, 1982:

Dear Olga,

You may remember how upset I was that earthlings left such a mess on the moon, like a bunch of city people on a Sunday evening littering the banks of a pond with refuse from their sausages and mustard. Everything that was too heavy and no longer necessary the astronauts simply left scattered around the landing module; and in addition there is all manner of scrap metal strewn about on the moon (the now inactive Lunachod, rockets that have made hard or soft landings, etc.). Millions of years after our civilization has ceased to exist and its last traces on earth have turned to dust, the junkyard we have left behind us will remain unchanged on the moon, a sad monument to our advanced civilization. This distresses me not just because I’m essentially a tidy person; the reasons go far deeper: there is in it a rather melancholy symbol. I mention this because my meditations are edging toward—among other things—an analysis of the situation that this symbol illustrates.

(Heřmanice was a labor prison in Ostrava, northern Moravia, where Havel served over 3 1/2 years welding and acetylene torch cutting before being shifted to laundry and scrap metal as his health deteriorated, which eventually led to his release after spiking a serious fever in January 1983.)

“The Jumping Frenchmen of Maine” — Ross Bullen in The Public Domain Review:

In addition to the gendered dimension of neurasthenia (the majority of those diagnosed were women), it was also seen as a particularly American disease, with some ever referring to the ailment as “Americanitis”. [George Miller] Beard was among those interested in the national character of neurasthenia, a concept he explored in his book American Nervousness (1881). “The greater prevalence of nervousness in America”, he writes, “is a complex resultant of a number of influences, the chief of which are the dryness of the air, extremes of heat and cold, civil and religious liberty, and the great mental activity made necessary and possible in a new and productive country under such climactic conditions.” Despite this capacious description of what it is that makes Americans nervous, Beard emphatically states that the Jumping Frenchmen do not qualify. While sufferers of neurasthenia appear tired and enervated, the lumberjacks of Moosehead Lake are “among the best examples of physical hardness and endurance”. Beard makes a distinction between “nervousness” and “unbalanced mental organization”, aligning the jumpers squarely with the latter category. The closest analogue Beard can find for the Jumping Frenchmen are “Middle Age epidemics”, like the so-called dancing plagues that periodically occurred in Europe during the late Middle Ages and early modern period. The victims of these epidemics had “but little intellectual strength and very much emotion”, a description that he implicitly associates with the Jumping Frenchmen as well. For Beard, the Jumping Frenchmen cannot suffer from modern American nervousness because — as Canadians, as francophones, and as rural laborers — they are not really modern Americans. Rather, they are “precious curiosities, relics or antiques that the fourteenth century has, as it were, dropped right into the middle of the nineteenth.” […]

… Beard finds an analogue for the jumpers in the hysterical epidemics of the Middle Ages, but also with the “Holy Rollers” of various religious revivals, who would roll on the ground in a state of uncontrollable religious ecstasy. While throwing a pipe or hitting your friend might seem very different from communing with the Holy Spirit, Beard sees them as deeply related, if distinct, forms of human behavior.

… While other forms of psychic or mass hysteria can last hours or days, the action of the jumpers is both immediate and short lived. “The explosion of the Jumper, like the explosion of a revolver, is sudden and instantaneous”, Beard writes. “If we look at a Jumper five seconds after he has been jumped, we see no indication of what he has just done.” The second key difference is “the persistence and permanence of the liability to be excited”. People tend to move on from other forms of psychic hysteria. Once the medieval peasants stop dancing, or the Holy Rollers stop rolling, they return to their regular lives. Not so the Jumping Frenchmen, for whom jumping is a lifelong condition. Beard considers that jumping may be hereditary — he notes that many of the jumpers he met belong to the same extended family. He also speculates that jumping may have been “an evolution of tickling”, noting that many jumpers are ticklish, and that jumpers deliberately prank one another “in lieu of most other sources of amusement”. But ultimately Beard concludes that “[e]verything about this subject is incredible.”

Also, an early line in the essay worth quoting:

After running through a list of symptoms typically associated with the Jumping Frenchmen — throwing, striking, jumping — Beard speculates that the jumpers may be “an extreme illustration of what we all are — that is, they possessed far less inhibitory power than we all possessed.

Daniel A. Cox:

One of the things that we were doing in all the groups that we talked to, we were talking to young single men and young single women, and we would try to get a sense of what their formative experiences were like. What were your parents telling you? … What did your parents emphasize when you were growing up? Did you hear about the importance of getting college education and the importance of being financially stable? A lot of what we heard from folks was like, yeah, their parents were emphasizing this. We had asked for a show of hands, whether it was the men’s groups or women’s groups, everyone was saying, yes, my parents were talking to me about this.

We’re like, okay, well, what about marriage? How many of you are hearing your parents talk about the importance of finding a long-term partner and getting married? And not one person raised their hand in any of these focus groups that their parents talked about this. We asked about the importance of parenthood. How many of your parents were stressing that this really matters, this is important? And again, no one raised their hands.

A couple of the women said that their grandparents had mentioned this, but their parents had not. And in a national representative survey, we took the same question and we got basically the same results: that among this generation, Generation Z, they’re far less likely to have heard about the importance and what it means to live a good life includes being a parent or getting married. It was much more about individual accomplishments and professional achievements, academic achievements. That is what folks are learning.

Frederick Buechner, in a letter to his newborn grandson to be opened on his 21st birthday:

Even if my grandfathers had been less shadowy and I had been less timid, I wonder if I would ever have been able to learn from them what I would give so much to know now about who they were, both for its own sake and also for the sake of learning something more about who I am myself. Even if I were to stretch this letter out, God forbid, to a thousand pages, would I ever be able to convey my full story to you? I suspect the answer is no. I suspect that our stories in their fullness will always be hidden from each other and that all those whiskered old men and bonneted old women looking out at us from their photographs in the family album will always remain mysteries to us even if, like me, they happen to have written their memoirs. And yet I believe that all is not lost. Maybe we can never know each other’s stories in their fullness, but I believe we can know them in their depth for the reason that in their depth we all have the same story.

Whether we’re rich or poor, male or female, a nineteenth-century Swiss jeweler like Isaac Golay in his oversized frock coat, or a twentieth-century American clergyman like me with a penchant for writing books, or a young squirt celebrating his twenty-first birthday in the twenty-first century like you, our stories are all stories of searching. We search for a good self to be and for good work to do. We search to become human in a world that tempts us always to be less than human or looks to us to be more. We search to love and to be loved. And in a world where it is often hard to believe in much of anything, we search to believe in something holy and beautiful and life-transcending that will give meaning and purpose to the lives we live.

When supermarket eggs were getting expensive a while back, a local farmer’s market vendor said she was raising the price of her eggs. Not because her input costs were increasing—they hadn’t, she said–but simply because the supermarket price had gone up. To paraphrase from memory, “It’s not right that I should not get paid just as much for my eggs, since they are a superior product.”

Nice timing from my friend Jeremy in his post on “luxury localism.” The first thing it reminded me of was the way that luxury localism has basically always been with us. Whole Foods (and Fresh Fields before them) was always a business model that hopes to eat other businesses for lunch. It lost no soul in its its acquisition by Amazon — that was pure destiny, baby. The target demagogic were the “eco-affluent” playactors who longed for “simulations of a simpler and more wholesome existence,” to use Dougald Hine’s description. (I owe the discovery of Hine to Jeremy as well.) 

But it’s great timing because I was just chatting about this over the weekend. Post furniture moving on Saturday, I was shooting the shit with a couple guys and complaining about lamenting the seldom articulated difference between a free market that sets appropriate prices (what we think the market does) and one that basically asks “What’s the highest price I can get away with?” (what the market actually does).*

“Unconstrained maximization” to use a phrase from MacIntyre that I was just reading today, which is another reason it’s great timing. In fact MacIntyre, speaking of the unnecessary and harmful dichotomy between relationships of mutual advantage and relationships of sympathetic affection, gives a great example of this:

Affective and sympathetic ties are always more than a matter of affection and sympathy. And in a similar way relationships of rational exchange, governed by norms to which it is to the advantage of each participant to adhere, are also embedded in and sustained by relationships governed by norms of uncalculated and unpredicted giving and receiving. So it is with those institutionalized relationships that make possible the exchanges of markets.

It is indeed true that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest” (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations I, ii). And just as butcher, brewer, and baker generally act with regard to their own interest, so too do their customers. But if, on entering the butcher’s shop as an habitual customer I find him collapsing from a heart attack, and I merely remark ‘Ah! Not in a position to sell me my meat to-day, I see,’ and proceed immediately to his competitor’s store to complete my purchase, I will have obviously and grossly damaged my whole relationship to him, including my economic relationship, although I will have done nothing contrary to the norms of the market. Less obviously and less grossly, even if I respond to his condition only by satisfying those minimum requirements that will enable me to rebut quasilegal accusations of irresponsibility—I call an ambulance and the moment the medical technicians arrive I leave—I will still have undermined my relationship to him and his, by my avoidance of my larger responsibility. Market relationships can only be sustained by being embedded in certain types of local nonmarket relationship, relationships of uncalculated giving and receiving, if they are to contribute to overall flourishing, rather than, as they so often in fact do, undermine and corrupt communal ties.

Norms of giving and receiving are then to some large degree presupposed both by our affective ties and by our market relationships. Detach them from this background presupposition in social practice and each becomes a source of vice…

Going back to that Ian Marcus Corbin interview, there was a moment when he was describing something similar, and similarly hilariously tragic. “If you had a tribe where a small number of the people in the tribe were getting phenomenally personally wealthy by doing harm to the other people in the tribe,” Corbin say, “you would go whack those guys over the head with a club.”

Earlier in the interview he says

And I think it leads to the kind of baffling levels of hoarding and indifference that we see in a society like America right now.

Black Elk, who I mentioned before, he visited New York City in the late 19th century and he wass like, What is this? This is insane. He’s like, You have people who have more than they could ever use in their whole lives and other people who are starving, and they’re just near each other, and they’re not giving it to the people who need it. This is bananas. And you have other European observers being like, Whoa, this is so weird. Money means way too much. What’s going on?

What’s goin on is that we’ve isolated a market relationship, called it one of “mutual advantage,” and asked it the one, simple question: What is the most I/we/it can get away with? And we call the answer “fair market value.” And if asked to think further, about justice or righteousness or virtue, we shrug. What business is that of the Free Market’s? What are you, a Marxist?

____

*Better: What’s the most I can get away with?, or, What’s the least I can get away with? depending on circumstances. What it doesn’t ask is, What is the right thing to do? What price and what practice is best for this or that community? Amazon is the American dream in both directions. The seller owner gets to make billions; the participants of mutual exchange consumers get to spend less and be more lazy relax more, all while getting the privilege of being good happy little consumers, too. Win, win, win, win. But the love of money, by any other name, is still the root of all evil. 

Also, there’s a question that was raised about whether the seller of eggs in Jeremy’s post is even managing to make a profit at all. I can’t answer that. But I think Jeremy’s post stands regardless and I think he rightly laments what he observed. I can have a solid appreciation for the role of money or the market and still remember that money is, to use another, older MacIntyrean phrase, the ultimate “‘good’ external to any practice.” The perpetual struggle to make eggs answer to money-market forces may just be a great reminder of that incompatibility that we swim in so regularly. A lot of our eggs come from a neighbor down the street — as a gift. A lot of my family’s eggs come from my grandmother or my sister — as a gift. Eggs being given and received as a gift of shared neighborliness — that is a good internal to a practice, and it has no incompatibility to speak of. 

Meanwhile, the World Petroleum Congress—a nearly century-old gathering of energy ministers and oil executives that organizers expected to draw more than 25,000 people—opened in Riyadh on Sunday. Organizers had reassured investors that the kingdom’s major conferences would go ahead as planned, but the chief executives of ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, Shell, and BP withdrew. The kingdom, which has poured money from its nearly $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund into an effort to become a global business hub, is also slated to host its flagship investment conference, the 10th annual Future Investment Initiative, on October 26-29, and in January, Saudi Arabia will welcome the AFC Asian Cup, hoping to draw hundreds of thousands of soccer fans.

As usual, Jeffrey Foucault brings some of the best that words can do in his latest newsletter:

You can make Tuscan Chops without fresh sage leaves but you should not. As a river without fish is only water running downhill, the Chops without fresh sage are only pork chops fried with garlic.

But to walk out in the first brisk dusk, a jazz record carrying thinly through the screen door, the grass cold under your bare feet, and to snip the broad, living leaves of sage from the garden, stacking them in your palm like pages of summer, their trichomes standing up in soft and minutely patterned resinous velvet, redolent of so many good things — Artemisia Ludoviciana, the prairie sage you have crinkled into the patch pocket of your snap shirt on rivers across the Mountain West; the pine forests of Northern Wisconsin that you wandered as a boy; the tightly coiled smudge you buy on the road every winter at the little country store in Tesuque, NM, and bring home to consecrate dark mornings by the wood stove — and then to bring the leaves in and toss them into a hot skillet with olive oil and a little butter until they become crisply translucent, small panes of stained glass scattered over a well turned pork chop, with rice and a simple pan sauce. Well, there is grace itself.

We dropped the kid off at college, came home and wept. In the morning we hiked up our pants and started after our work, having our coffee together and convening again in the evenings to make the ritual of supper, and remember the antediluvian pattern of life.

We must have found the recipe in a magazine not long after I moved out here, twenty-odd years ago. But we haven’t looked at it in years, and we’ve deconstructed and elaborated upon whatever it was. The recipe is elementary and like so many of the best, depends more on grammar — time, temperature, order of operations — than on wizardry. The best food is peasant food, older than the Bible, and more forgiving.

A quick note I want to add, a little apropos of yesterday’s post. Something else from Frederick Buechner that I was reading last night, from his essay “The Longing for Home”:

The word longing comes from the same route as the word long in the sense of length in either time or space, and also the word belong, so that in its full richness to long suggests to yearn for a long time for something that is a long way off and something that we feel we belong to, and that belongs to us.

Earlier in the essay Buechner asks, “Are the words true home perhaps too much to apply to even the happiest home that lies within our power to create? Are they words that always point to a reality beyond themselves?”

I’m not thinking at the moment that I’m doing it justice, and maybe it’s just that I can’t hear the word antediluvian and not hear it in an eschatological and promissory way alongside its ancient, primitive ring.

Anyway, this is a reminder that — I don’t know how, I don’t know when (and I don’t know where I put my notes) — but I really want to get to Part II of that “radical anticipation” post.