Is the Dow Jones Industrial Average a good indicator of the state of the American economy? Not really, says Alexis Madrigal: “There is a nostalgic comfort in thinking that the same single number, composed of a potpourri of well-known companies nominally headquartered in this country, represent the American role in the massively complex, globalized economy.”
The philosopher Stanley Cavell has died. Christopher Benfey remembers him in The New York Review of Books: “He was a jazz musician before he was a philosopher. An air of improvisation and fun hung over everything he did…He didn’t prepare a syllabus. He didn’t order books for his courses. He was casual with student papers. According to the awful assessment measures of our awful times, he was probably a lousy teacher, and yet he was the most exciting classroom presence I’ve ever experienced.”
Hundreds of self-help writers share “strategies” for using time more efficiently, but what if there is wisdom in wasting it? Rebecca Foster reviews Patricia Hampl’s The Art of the Wasted Day.
Lincoln’s humor: “Readers of the University Bookman—somewhere between exasperation and resignation—probably wonder whether we really need another book on Lincoln. The answer is—in the tradition of lawyers everywhere—it depends. Richard Carwardine, professor emeritus at Oxford University and author of the prize-winning Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power, fills a legitimate gap in Lincoln studies. How can this be, you ask? Well, it is a slim gap and Lincoln’s Sense of Humor a slim book.”
Václav Benda’s dissent: “The ‘apparent transparency’ of Marxist doctrine had become nothing more than ‘the ideological camouflage of a much more primary orientation to force and power.’ The nature of this ‘primary orientation’—Benda saw communism, at core, as a program for the seizure and exercise of untrammeled power—meant that it was natural, maybe even predictable, that the regime should have devolved into ‘pure illegitimacy . . . that makes a point of the fact that it neither serves nor is responsible to anything else (truth, human society, tradition, laws, not even to its own ideas).’”
Essay of the Day:
In First Things, C. R. Wiley writes about the “connection between working with your hands and manhood”:
“I met men for the first time when I was eleven years old. My father left me with them. He was an academic. I don’t know much about what he did for the University at Buffalo, and later Washington University in St. Louis. When he was at work, he wasn’t with us. But he wasn’t around much when he wasn’t working. His spare time was largely given to the Church of Scientology. I remember the Org since I was often reluctant baggage carted off there (‘Org’ being the moniker for a local organization of Scientologists—at least in those days). Since Scientologists didn’t have much use for kids, there wasn’t much for kids to do. Mostly we waited for our parents to finish up whatever they were doing. There was a lot of clay to play with (that’s another story). But we spent most of our time sitting beneath the enormous photographs of the plumpy and unappealing L. Ron Hubbard.
“Scientology requires total dedication while paradoxically encouraging complete self-absorption. On top of that, it is very expensive, so there wasn’t much money to spend on the family after bills were paid. And apparently the bills went unpaid, since my father went bankrupt. After that, he drove my mother, my sister, and me in his Opel Kadett to western Pennsylvania, to the town where I had been born. And there he deposited us and drove away for good. It was January 1974.
“Western Pennsylvania was another world. Men did things there that men do, often right in front of people. It wasn’t just for show, like bodybuilders flexing biceps. They pulled engines and cleaned deer because those things needed doing. It was a world of functional manhood.
“Most of them enjoyed happy marriages, with a gun rack in the truck, and a wife who drove it to the quilting circle once a week. Two vehicles to a home were rare then. Besides trucks, they shared in the raising of children, and vegetables, and not a few dogs. And they lived harmoniously, if somewhat dowdily, with work for women, and different work for men, without drama or violence, in small homes on large lots. They participated in their communities, too, usually a church or an ethnic club, one for the Poles, another for the Italians. Things are different now, but you probably knew that. Today, it is dismissively called ‘Pennsyltucky.’
“In my nineteenth year, I left for a world more like the one I had known before. I went to college and eventually became someone who makes a living with words. I’m a pastor, and I’ve taught philosophy to undergraduates. But I’ve taken western Pennsylvania with me wherever I’ve gone, because it was there that I learned to respect, and eventually to love, manual competence. I worked my way through seminary as a framer. Later, between pastorates, I earned a living as a home improvement contractor. Western Pennsylvania gave me balance, a life in which my hands and my head work in rhythm, my writing alternating with the repair and maintenance of my apartment buildings.”
Photo: Yunnan terraces
Text: Varlam Shalamov, “Tales from the Gulag”
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