Spring I. Exposition

Intro & Preface & Contents

For more than a week my pen has lain untouched I have written nothing for seven whole days, not even a letter. Except during one or two bouts of illness, such a thing never happened in my life before. In my life; the life, that is, which had to be supported by anxious toil; the life which was not lived for living’s sake, as all life should be, but under the goad of fear. The earning of money should be a means to an end; for more than thirty years -- I began to support myself at sixteen -- I had to regard it as the end itself.

... How I dreaded the white page I had to foul with ink! Above all, on days such as this, when the blue eyes of Spring laughed from between rosy clouds, when the sunlight shimmered upon my table and made me long, long all but to madness, for the scent of the flowering earth, for the green of hillside larches, for the singing of the skylark above the downs. There was a time -- it seems further away than childhood -- when I took up my pen with eagerness; if my hand trembled it was with hope. But a hope that fooled me, for never a page of my writing deserved to live. I can say that now without bitterness. It was youthful error, and only the force of circumstances prolonged it. The world has done me no injustice; thank Heaven I have grown wise enough not to rail at it for this! And why should any man who writes, even if he writes things immortal, nurse anger at the world’s neglect? Who asked him to publish? Who promised him a hearing? Who has broken faith with him? If my shoemaker turn me out an excellent pair of boots, and I, in some mood of cantankerous unreason, throw them back upon his hands, the man has just cause for complaint. But your poem, your novel, who bargained with you for it? ... If you have written a great book, the world to come will know of it. But you don’t care for posthumous glory. You want to enjoy fame in a comfortable armchair...

Alpha.

In my case it was not a bequest but Social Security and savings, some, it's true, inherited from my parents, that has placed me in my secure position. I own my apartment outright and -- between Social Security and the fixed income from gift annuities to some of my favorite charities -- I have a bit more in income than I spend in a year. I don't have enough to buy a cottage in the country, like Ryecroft, but then I shouldn't want to anyway. I am content to live in the city and enjoy city life. For one thing this saves me from needing to own a car.

Since my income was almost always irregular and I frequently needed to live on savings between jobs, I had always lived on a tight budget. You get so you don't even think about making unnecessary purchases or taking vacations. Now, I find it a strange pleasure to consider what I might do with the somewhat more than I need that I have. I will talk about one of the bigger items next time (I do sometimes look ahead in the book), but I've only made a few changes to my usual routine.

First, I contracted with a cleaning service to have people come in every two months and give the place a good cleaning. I've always done my own cleaning -- and I still do my own laundry and cooking -- but having someone come in regularly forces me to keep the place tidy. Left to my own devices I might let things slide for months at a time. Second, I obtained a cellular phone plan that also offers WiFi-hotspot service so I can use my laptop nearly anywhere. Finally, I now have wicked fast Internet service at home. Two of these items would be a complete mystery to Ryecroft, and the third would be almost as puzzling -- to be dependent on a servant in the 21st century just seems to be more bother than it's worth.

I expect there will be regular, if relatively short, vacations in my future but I'm still taking things slowly.

Beta. The Matrix and Lucy

Making a film about Epistemology or Metaphysics is, of course, a ridiculous idea since no sane American concerns himself with such things. And yet if you incorporate concepts derived from the study of such arcane fields into an action film, and throw in enough gratuitous violence, you can have a hit on your hands. The Matrix did very well playing with the idea that the world we experience may not be the real world. Without talking about māyā or broaching the finer points of Existential Phenomenology, The Matrix at least introduced this concept to a mass audience.

At this point I feel I need to quote extensively from one of my favorite novels, The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery:

Which brings us to the second question: what do we know of the world? Idealists like Kant have an answer to this question. What do they answer? They answer: not a great deal. Transcendental idealism holds that we can know only that which appears to our consciousness, that semi-devine entity that rescues us from our animal self. What we know of the world is what our consciousness can say about it because of what it has perceived -- and nothing else. Let us take an example, at random: a sweet cat by the name of Leo [Madame Michel's cat]. Why? Because I find it easier with a cat. And let me ask you: how can you be certain that it really is a cat and, likewise, how can you even know what a cat is? A healthy reply would consist in emphasizing the fact that your perception of the animal, complemented by a few conceptual and linguistic mechanisms, has enabled you to constitute your knowledge. But the response of the transcendental idealist would be to illustrate how impossible it is to know whether what we perceive and conceive of as a cat -- if that which appears to our consciousness as a cat -- is actually true to what the cat is in its deepest being. It may well be that my cat -- at present I perceive him as an obese quadruped with quivering whiskers and I have filed him away in my mind in a drawer labeled 'cat' -- is in actual fact, and in his essence, a blob of green sticky stuff that does not meow. My senses, however, have been fashioned in such a way that this is not apparent to me, and the revolting blob of green sticky stuff, deceiving both my disgust and my earnest trust, is masquerading before my consciousness beneath the appearance of a silky and gluttonous house pet. So much for Kantian idealism. What we know of the world is only the idea that our consciousness forms of it. But there is an even more depressing theory than that one, a theory that offers a prospect even more terrifying than that of innocently caressing a lump of green drool or dropping our toast every morning into a pustular abyss we had mistaken for a toaster. There is the idealism of Edmund Husserl... According to Husserl's theory, all that exists is the perception of the cat. And the cat itself? Well, we can just do without it. Bye-bye kitty. Who needs a cat? What cat? Henceforth, philosophy will claim the right to wallow exclusively in the wickedness of pure mind. The world is an inaccessible reality and any effort to try to know it is futile. What do we know of the world? Nothing. As all knowledge is merely reflective consciousness exploring its own self, the world, therefore, can merrily go to the devil. This is phenomenology: the 'science of that which appears to our consciousness.' How does a phenomenologist spend his day? He gets up, fully conscious as he takes his shower that he is merely soaping a body whose existence has no foundation, then he wolfs down a few slices of toast and jam that have been nihilized, slips on some clothes that are the equivalent of an empty set of parentheses, heads for his office, and then snatches up a cat. It matters little to our phenomenologist whether the cat exists or does not exist or even what a cat is in its very essence. The indemonstrable does not interest him. What cannot be denied, however, is that a cat appeared to his consciousness, and it is this act of appearing that is of concern to our good fellow.

Today I saw the movie Lucy, and while it is too soon to know how popular it will be (and I really need to see it a second time), it at least broaches the subject of the nature of reality in a Quantum universe, where matter is a state of energy, or possibly a harmonic state of energy if you are fond of String Theory. Luc Besson is a tricky director to watch as you have to turn off much of the reasoning portions of your brain (to get past the scientific nonsense, in The Fifth Element the notion that you can recreate, not just the physical person, but also the memories and even the bad, hair dye job of a person from her DNA. In Lucy the idea that using more of your brain allows you to violate the laws of physics). At the same time, you have to be alert for the interesting scientific/philosophical ideas being played with. The true premise of Lucy is: What would happen if you could interact with the universe as energy rather than as matter? -- ignoring the way it “appears” to us. The drug that allows her to use more of her brain, is just a clunky device for establishing a more profound connection with the "stuff" of the universe. Also a way of transcending classic mind-body dualism.

Maybe if you gave Scarlett Johansson enough guns she could even get Americans to learn algebra.

Another passage, again of Madam Michel, from Hedgehog is worth quoting here,

An interesting phenomenological experiment might consist in exploring the reasons why some phenomena fail to appear to the consciousness of some people but do appear to the consciousness of others. The fact that my image can at one and the same time make an impression in Neptun's skull [a dog] and bounce off that of Chabrot [the private physician to one of the wealthy residents] altogether is indeed a fascinating concept.

This is a very interesting line of thought. For example, by this same standard, we would have to grant to animals in general and even to plants a degree of consciousness since they are aware of and respond to things -- like the sun -- in their environment. (I recently saw an interesting time-lapse of plants showing how they move in anticipation of the sun's rising.) Some kind of phenomenological reality must be "present" for plants and "lower" life forms. Which, given our fairly tenuous position in a phenomenological world, makes them our equals.

Here is an interesting TED talk on reality and perception that arrives at the same conclusion Husserl did but starting with Darwin rather than with Kant.

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