Montaigne loved open debate. “No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers with my own.” He like being contradicted, as it opened up more interesting conversations and helped him to think–something he preferred to do through interaction rather than staring into the fire like Descartes. His friend Florimond de Raemond described his conversation as “the sweetest and most enriched with graces.” Yet when Montaigne was not feeling sweet, or when he was carried away by the topic of discussion, he could be vociferous. His passion led him to say things that were indiscreet, and he encouraged others to do the same.
Bakewell, Sarah. How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. New York: Other Press, 2011 pp170.
Tag: Essays
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Finally reading Self-Reliance
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Self-RelianceEmerson is someone I often hear quoted and mentioned on podcasts, but how many have truly read him?
I had not.
As you make your way through the classics you begin to realize, they’re classics for two reasons.
One, their themes, envy in this case, are timeless. This is true for novels, essays, or epic poems.
And two, they are typically more readable than you’d first imagine. See tip #6: Read Western canonical literature.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Illustrated Emerson: Essays and Poems. New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc. 2018
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From his essay, How to Do Great Work.
The entire essay is noteworthy, but this small section of quotes made me look at questions in a new way.
#1 – Really good questions are partial discoveries:
One of the biggest misconceptions about new ideas is about the ratio of question to answer in their composition. People think big ideas are answers, but often the real insight was in the question.
Part of the reason we underrate questions is the way they’re used in schools. In schools they tend to exist only briefly before being answered, like unstable particles. But a really good question is a partial discovery. How do new species arise? Is the force that makes objects fall to earth the same as the one that keeps planets in their orbits? By even asking such questions you were already in excitingly novel territory.
#2 – Revisit the questions from your youth.
Do you remember yours?
People talk a lot about the importance of keeping your youthful dreams alive, but it’s just as important to keep your youthful questions alive.
#3 – After answers, more questions.
This excerpt reminds me of the Haitian proverb, after the mountain, more mountains.
It’s a great thing to be rich in unanswered questions. And this is one of those situations where the rich get richer, because the best way to acquire new questions is to try answering existing ones. Questions don’t just lead to answers, but also to more questions.
Graham, Paul. “How to Do Great Work.” Paul Graham, 2023. http://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html. Accessed 3 July 2023.
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McPhee has built a career on…small detonations of knowledge. His mind is pure curiosity: It aspires to flow into every last corner of the world, especially the places most of us overlook…McPhee’s work is not melancholy, macabre, sad or defeatist. It is full of life. Learning, for him, is a way of loving the world, savoring it, before it’s gone. In the grand cosmology of John McPhee, all the earth’s facts touch one another-all its regions, creatures, and eras. It’s absences and presences. Fish, trucks, atoms, bears, whiskey, grass, rocks, lacrosse, weird prehistoric oysters, grandchildren and Pangea. Every part of time touches every other part of time.
– Sam Anderson
McPhee, John. The Patch. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018 (see back cover blurb, hardcover edition)I wanted to capture this passage for the language: Words like macabre and detonations stoke the linguistic fires. And nudge me towards the dictionary.
But also, it’s a returning theme in this commonplace book – curiosity.
The people that fascinate me; the Thomas Jeffersons, the Paul Otlets, the Temple Grandins, the Benjamin Rushes, are eternally curious. And curious about an eternal amount of subjects.
Sam Anderson is spot on. Learning is a way to love and savor our world.
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Sometimes I read straight on without going back, but often, when I learn one word, it explains the meaning of other words that came just before it, so I look back, and, one by one, each newly acquired word gives me the clue to the next one. Knowing Tom had gotten onto his knees before climbing into bed gave me the answer to another word: rezar = pray. And another, later: arrodillarse had to mean “kneel.” Reading a sentence several times over is often enough to teach me most of the mysterious words.
Lydia Davis, Reading Las Aventuras de Tom Sawyer, pg 93, Essays TwoThe essay Reading Las Aventuras de Tom Sawyer makes owning Essays Two entirely worth it. Lydia Davis’ passion for translation and foreign language led her to read a Spanish translation of Tom Sawyer by Sara Gomez. In the essay, Davis describes the little games she devised to bolster her understanding of Spanish. One game was, she decided to not look up any word in the dictionary while reading through the book. The idea being, to learn words from context only.
Lydia again reminds us of the power rereading a sentence. Here though, it’s to reveal the meaning of “mysterious” Spanish words. My guess is, not only did the rereading reveal the meaning, but it would likely have embedded the meaning into her memory.
Reps matter.
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I find that simply reading a sentence carefully a second time can yield significantly more understanding. I’m not sure exactly what happens in the brain between the first and second readings.
Lydia Davis, Before my morning coffee, pg 374, Essays TwoHere Lydia Davis is referring to re-reading a passage while translating an A.L. Snijders’ story from Dutch to English. But practicing a careful second reading could be applied to many other readings too. Emails and poems come to mind.
Floodlights and Goalposts 