Previous - 176. Grace & satori
Johnson & Montaigne
Finally back to Montaigne. Reading this, short, section is such a pleasure to me. This is a mongrel of a book, I'm not sure all these people really fit together in any meaningful way, regardless of how many This or That categories you come up with. And Montaigne is the one who is most out of place. He's comfortable in his own skin and amused by what he finds in the world and in himself. He's philosophical in the best sense of the term.
But he also, if only by contrast, shows how all these other people are either naturally, or because of the culture they grew up in, at odds with their nature and struggling -- mostly unsuccessfully -- against themselves. This reminds me of the Buddhist/Hindu tendency to want to transcend and stop the wheel from turning, which is countered by the tantra (I think?) notion that even transcendence is something of an illusion. That there's nothing wrong with this world we are already in.
Montaigne would understand that, but Augustine and Day and Johnson would not. This book is supposedly about character building, but there is a sense in which our characters can't be altered. Day and Johnson could perpetually struggle against their character, but they could not transcend it. Even Eisenhower was at best able to keep a lid on his temper most of the time. He never became a person who didn't have issues with anger management. "The Road to Recovery" might have been a better title for this book.
It should come as no surprise that Brooks's judgement of Johnson and Montaigne is rather different than mine,
p234 We can each of us decide if we are a little more like Montaigne or a little more like Johnson, or which master we can learn from on which occasion. For my part I'd say that Johnson, through arduous effort, built a superior greatness. He was more a creature of the active world... Most important, Johnson understood that it takes some hard pressure to sculpt a character... There has to be some pushing, some sharp cutting, and hacking. It has to be done in confrontation with the intense events of the real world, not in retreat from them. Montaigne had such a genial nature, maybe he could be shaped through gentle observation. Most of us will end up mediocre and self-forgiving if we try to do that.
I have to confess that I've been unfair to Johnson and Brooks both by not including the account of Johnson's childhood and youth. That he achieved so much is truly astonishing, and a great story of someone overcoming every obstacle in life. My point is that, while he became a great success (and I do envy his association with Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon and the rest), as presented here by Brooks, he did not become a particularly happy person. Though this may just mean that I would not want to trade places with him while I could trade places with Montaigne. (Perhaps "trade minds", would be a better way of putting it.)
And Brooks isn't blind to the difference in the two that I'm talking about,
p236 ...He [Johnson] never achieved the equanimity that seems to have marked Montaigne's mature years, or the calmness and reserve he admired in others. He lived all his life with periodic feelings of despair, depression, shame, masochism, and guilt...
Bastille Day
I've been greening events now for 10 years and I have to say that this was the oddest one I've ever worked. When I arrived at 11:00 AM, the vendors were all setup and doing a bit of business. There was a stage for music that was still being hooked-up. The music didn't start until 6 PM, and that's when a crowd finally arrived and the vendors started taking down their booths.
There was never much in the way of trash for us to sort. I pulled from all the stations on a regular basis, but I had to wait between each round to give the trash some time to build up. After 6 PM the "beer garden" finally got crowded so there was a steady stream of empty wine bottles to pull, but that was the only time a trash can got full.
Which brings me to the highlight of my day. After my second or third trip to empty the wine bottle can (and also collect the packing material used to protect the bottles -- it's the same paper product used in egg cartons, but bigger, though still very light in weight) I suggested to the crew chief that we take another can to them so they would have a backup and thus wouldn't run out of space even if we were delayed in cleaning out the cans.
He came with me bringing the can and we cleaned out everything that vendor had and set them up with the backup can. But then we noticed the vendor next to them had a stack of the same paper packing thingies. We were on the other side of a little fence and couldn't reach them, but Tyler finally got the attention of someone at that other vendor station. First the guy was very suspicious of what we wanted with the pile of trash, as though we were random people trying to steal something valuable. Once we convinced him (green shirts with company logo and trash toter being our tokens of authority) he proceeded to hand them to Tyler one at a time, rather than just picking up the entire pile which together weight almost nothing. We were cracking up. Tyler was going to carry them to the dumpsters, but I still had room in the toter and said that, and added that he should just give them to me... one at a time.
Perhaps we had been in the hot sun too long.
No comments:
Post a Comment