The Obvious

Threatening the sovereignty and territorial integrity of two of our closest and most faithful allies, Canada and Denmark, makes me sick. It's repulsive. It's dishonorable. It's also incredibly stupid, but I don't even care about that. Stupid can be mended. Dishonor is forever.

(I don't often talk about daily politics, because others are so much better equipped and more skilled at it, but occasionally it's worth saying the obvious in so many words. My penchant for the long view and the global picture might give the impression that I think that immediate and local issues are unimportant. I don't, at all; I'm just particularly inept at addressing them. But when silence might be taken for complicity, I do think that someone with a public platform, however tiny, ought to speak up. So I might begin the next few blog posts with little statements like this.)

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It does feel ridiculous, cultivating myself while the country is wrecking itself, but what else am I to do? I must work on something, and I’m the only thing at hand. We are just at the beginning of a cascade of crises, and the only thing I’m sure of is that more will be required of me, in the new world: that there will be less room for self-indulgence and self-pity. People urge me to go easy on myself, and while I appreciate their compassion and benevolence, I think they’re wrong. What I need is to go hard on myself. I have piddled away much of my life going easy on myself.

And behind it all, the Good of the Neoplatonists, the Nature of the Stoics, whatever the hell it is: that without which nothing actually makes sense: that which dissolves whenever you look at it directly and try to put it to use. It will not be used.

Humility is the hardest of the virtues. To do the work at hand: here, now.

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When I was four years old, my parents took me to Disneyland. Underwater in Captain Nemo's submarine, I looked out through the portals. Monsters of the deep were everywhere. A shark lunged at the window; I was terrified. My mother tried to reassure me, saying, "It's all right, Evan, it isn't real." Then a giant squid attacked us; my father said it also wasn't real. At this point, my parents tell me, I looked up and asked, "Are we real?"

-- Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being, chapter 6