Last week was my first week back at work after I had to take four days' holiday due to a flu. The flu was unusual for me in that it wasn't so much an ordinary sickness as it was like a strange journey into a Dali-esque universe that only resembled reality. Spending time with my mother and siblings was the one very nice aspect; the rest of it was mind-boggling and unpleasant.
Although the lower temperatures were helpful when I had a fever, the unending winter is also burdensome. Crocuses are out now, but a few of them already were weeks ago and that didn't prevent frost, sleet, snow and rain from returning; and even now the trees are absolutely bare. It's Easter weekend, but despite the beaming sunshine today it's not the kind of weather where I'd trust that spring is truly here.
I am also unhappy about some aspects at work; and small things like eating reheated instead of fresh food, an overstuffed office, feeling lonely and demoralized because colleagues I interact with often are absent, and the cramped and disagreeable transit to and from work in airless trains and buses are all sapping my enjoyment of the small things in life.
But I also noticed that being sick coincided with immense egocentricity, which probably makes me unhappy in itself — any kind of intellectual activity seems too much effort, and I've rarely been so uninterested in anyone's welfare except mine.
In the U-Bahn I've been reading We Were Eight Years in Power, mostly — the essay about whether the United States government should pay reparations to the African-American community to compensate not directly for slavery, but more for the century and a half of economic sabotage and deprivation that have impoverished African Americans since then.
And at home I've been reading excerpts of an anthology of English literature, and much to my surprise have found the essay about the Elizabethan age quite engrossing; normally it's not a time period I really feel I understand or feel very drawn to.
Friday, March 30, 2018
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
A Long Telegram In The Middle of March
After the weather peaked at 16°C on the weekend, the freezing point is coming nearer again, and it was rainy at times and cloudy at all times today. That said, the rain has seemed like mild spring rain, and the gloomy light is less gloomy than it was a month ago.
A report on the florist's in the U-Bahn: battered-looking muddy pink hyacinths are now standing alongside the pastel azaleas, flowering yellow daffodils, budding prunus? branches and spiralling reddish branches, yellow and purple primroses, etc.
The U-Bahn trains have been 'running at irregular intervals' lately. Many are antiquated, and the flu season has reduced the ranks of the mechanics who generally would otherwise fix them. Apparently graffiti and other aesthetic alteration of the trains also requires time in the workshop. It makes my journeys to work a little more exciting.
This morning I read more of the astrophysics book, groaning internally when I began a chapter about the mathematics of it all. There were already lots of equations earlier in the book and I don't really understand, for example, what differential equations are. (My science-orientated sister took a calculus class in high school, but I was doing so terribly in my math classes after Grade 10 — I didn't understand much while I learned it, then forgot it right away — that it would have been absurd for me to try. I feel like apologizing to Papa for this not-very-engaged feeling against the field!)
In the evening I read more Res Gestae Divi Augusti. I thought a few weeks ago that this text was a tedious, self-involved laundry list of political gestures and that there wasn't much point in reading it. Apparently I have reconsidered. Besides that, I've made progress in We Were Eight Years in Power.
A report on the florist's in the U-Bahn: battered-looking muddy pink hyacinths are now standing alongside the pastel azaleas, flowering yellow daffodils, budding prunus? branches and spiralling reddish branches, yellow and purple primroses, etc.
The U-Bahn trains have been 'running at irregular intervals' lately. Many are antiquated, and the flu season has reduced the ranks of the mechanics who generally would otherwise fix them. Apparently graffiti and other aesthetic alteration of the trains also requires time in the workshop. It makes my journeys to work a little more exciting.
This morning I read more of the astrophysics book, groaning internally when I began a chapter about the mathematics of it all. There were already lots of equations earlier in the book and I don't really understand, for example, what differential equations are. (My science-orientated sister took a calculus class in high school, but I was doing so terribly in my math classes after Grade 10 — I didn't understand much while I learned it, then forgot it right away — that it would have been absurd for me to try. I feel like apologizing to Papa for this not-very-engaged feeling against the field!)
In the evening I read more Res Gestae Divi Augusti. I thought a few weeks ago that this text was a tedious, self-involved laundry list of political gestures and that there wasn't much point in reading it. Apparently I have reconsidered. Besides that, I've made progress in We Were Eight Years in Power.
Friday, March 02, 2018
Culture and Anarchy: A Serious Consideration
Today I finally turned the last page on Culture and Anarchy. Perhaps I should summarize it after all, as fairly as I can. Matthew Arnold wrote it in the 1860s, and even though this was about 30 years after the Reform Bill that amongst other things finally allowed more adult men [to vote]— not all adult men, because over two thousand years after Solon it was still believed that the men who were poorest were not men who should vote — it remained a period at which ordinary economic and political rights and social standing for the middle class were disputed. He was also much taken by the Oxford Movement, which as I understand it was a conservative tendency to want the Anglican Church (which was highly institutionalized, integrated with the monarchy and the government and the elite, because until after the essays of Culture and Anarchy were published, Oxford University still administered religious tests making sure its students were Anglican before conferring Master's degrees, etc.) to take up archaic rituals again. Of course a leader, Cardinal John Henry Newman, went over to the Catholic Church, which I imagine must have derailed matters a little. And in contrast, the middle and lower classes were scampering into churches and sects outside of the established church — and influential 'Dissenters,' gaining influence with liberal parliamentarians, wanted to weaken the state's intertwinement with the Anglican Church. This Dissenting uprising also fought successfully against the continued use of state taxes to prop up the Catholic Church in an Ireland that the Queen of England still ruled at the time.
Although he identifies himself as one of the 'middle class' and as very much in favour of any established church, which Matthew Arnold considers leads to a better and a less discomfiting religion than zealous individual fumbling after new creeds, he is very much the elite Anglican. His father was an Anglican, and head of Rugby School, and (like his son) became a professor at Oxford University.
I may be caricaturing Arnold when I say that he is trying to claw back privileges and equality from the rising middle classes and working classes beneath him, tooth and nail. But he has so many class neuroses in general as evidenced by his disdainful remarks about 'Philistines' (middle class), 'Populace' (working class), and 'Barbarians' (aristocracy) alike, that whatever he may say about dispassionately letting reason and pure motives shine on social questions, I find it hard to discern much magnanimity or enlightenment here.
His attitudes toward religion: Although I was wondering if this interpretation is inaccurate, given how much he read the Bible and theologians, etc. — I had the impression Arnold did not think that one should believe in religion enthusiastically ('Hebraism'). He believed we must keep it in firm bondage to secular intellectuality ('Hellenism') and only believe as much of it as feels comfortably uplifting.
He also criticizes 'doers,' whether it's liberal politicians who want to address sociopolitical ills without deliberating about what is the most agreeable way of doing it; or believers in religion who want to worship with 'fire and strength.' I imagine he wouldn't have approved of Martin Luther King Jr. at the time as he 'made people too uncomfortable.' What Matthew Arnold seems not to realize is that the cause of fixing the lack of coal in his neighbour's hearth will of course feel less urgent if his own hearth is well-filled — for emotional reasons rather than logical ones.
***
A passage or two suggests the duty of a cultivated person to spread enlightenment to other people. I have an absolute horror of telling anybody what to do, if it isn't sanctioned by their own conscience and free will. But now I perhaps get more why someone who felt intellectually strong and well read might want to bend others to her way of doing things; it cleared me up a little on the magisterial ways that my father's mother sometimes exemplified.
Ideally, Matthew Arnold's 'culture' is what I think of as 'cultivation.' The best books, the best music, the best philosophy, the best lessons from history and foreign affairs — learning all this and also steering to high principles. I am in favour of culture, with the modern meaning, as well as cultivation. But he rarely mentions it except when he mentions e.g. the painter Mr. Frith.
'Lower' culture lends colour to my days, it mirrors a broader part of the society around me and helps me feel less lonely, it inspires a few of the highest endeavours in the arts, and, like the proverbial flower in the wall, it is miraculous how it springs from the deserts of existence. It makes me happy, sometimes, and it makes me happier than the finest dialogue of Plato when things are not going so well because it is very much alive.
I also think, by the way, that religion can be a beautiful and helpful thing even if unleavened by classical philosophy and modern skepticism. Like any impulse toward a better understanding with one's fellow human beings and a kinder standard for one's self, it can be a cultivation in itself.
Although he identifies himself as one of the 'middle class' and as very much in favour of any established church, which Matthew Arnold considers leads to a better and a less discomfiting religion than zealous individual fumbling after new creeds, he is very much the elite Anglican. His father was an Anglican, and head of Rugby School, and (like his son) became a professor at Oxford University.
I may be caricaturing Arnold when I say that he is trying to claw back privileges and equality from the rising middle classes and working classes beneath him, tooth and nail. But he has so many class neuroses in general as evidenced by his disdainful remarks about 'Philistines' (middle class), 'Populace' (working class), and 'Barbarians' (aristocracy) alike, that whatever he may say about dispassionately letting reason and pure motives shine on social questions, I find it hard to discern much magnanimity or enlightenment here.
His attitudes toward religion: Although I was wondering if this interpretation is inaccurate, given how much he read the Bible and theologians, etc. — I had the impression Arnold did not think that one should believe in religion enthusiastically ('Hebraism'). He believed we must keep it in firm bondage to secular intellectuality ('Hellenism') and only believe as much of it as feels comfortably uplifting.
He also criticizes 'doers,' whether it's liberal politicians who want to address sociopolitical ills without deliberating about what is the most agreeable way of doing it; or believers in religion who want to worship with 'fire and strength.' I imagine he wouldn't have approved of Martin Luther King Jr. at the time as he 'made people too uncomfortable.' What Matthew Arnold seems not to realize is that the cause of fixing the lack of coal in his neighbour's hearth will of course feel less urgent if his own hearth is well-filled — for emotional reasons rather than logical ones.
***
A passage or two suggests the duty of a cultivated person to spread enlightenment to other people. I have an absolute horror of telling anybody what to do, if it isn't sanctioned by their own conscience and free will. But now I perhaps get more why someone who felt intellectually strong and well read might want to bend others to her way of doing things; it cleared me up a little on the magisterial ways that my father's mother sometimes exemplified.
Ideally, Matthew Arnold's 'culture' is what I think of as 'cultivation.' The best books, the best music, the best philosophy, the best lessons from history and foreign affairs — learning all this and also steering to high principles. I am in favour of culture, with the modern meaning, as well as cultivation. But he rarely mentions it except when he mentions e.g. the painter Mr. Frith.
'Lower' culture lends colour to my days, it mirrors a broader part of the society around me and helps me feel less lonely, it inspires a few of the highest endeavours in the arts, and, like the proverbial flower in the wall, it is miraculous how it springs from the deserts of existence. It makes me happy, sometimes, and it makes me happier than the finest dialogue of Plato when things are not going so well because it is very much alive.
I also think, by the way, that religion can be a beautiful and helpful thing even if unleavened by classical philosophy and modern skepticism. Like any impulse toward a better understanding with one's fellow human beings and a kinder standard for one's self, it can be a cultivation in itself.
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