231. Arendt & solipsism

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The Life of the Mind

by Hannah Arendt
Harcourt, originally published 1971

p30 The discussion here of the primacy of appearance can, I think, be read a little differently than the author intended in this Age of the Kardashians. Or maybe not, really. Certainly at a superficial level nothing is more important in our culture than mere appearance. Being is fine in its place, but appearance is going to gain more screen views and clicks. In this regard popular culture is very like the culture of birds. And this isn't only a recent development.


7 Reality and the thinking ego: the Cartesian doubt and the sensus communis

p45 This is where I get to calibrate, and it's not looking good. Given that Arendt claims that she, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Merleau-Pont are all on the same page re: Descartes' "I think, therefore I am." I have to admit I'm not exactly standing on bedrock here myself when I argue in opposition. 

What does confuse me is that Descartes and Kant were really on the same side here. I maintain that Descartes was fine with his first step, but immediately went to hell after that. Arendt and (I'm assuming the others) seem to have quibbles from the perspective of "pure reason." Which I admit I'm not following.

At least Arendt gets immediately to solipsism, indicating she understands what he was going on about, which has not always been the case in my experience when people parse Descartes. The one thing Descartes got right (in my opinion) is that thinking is the one thing we can't doubt. We can doubt everything having to do with sense perception and memory, but we can't doubt that we are thinking about all this. 

Everything that follows, or that Descartes wants to believe follows from, "Je pence, doc je suis," is rhetorical BS of a quality that no doubt stimulated the German thinkers to try to somehow equal the Gallic flow.

I'm going to ignore her bodyguard of famous names, and go with her own attack on Descartes,

p48 ...So strong was the experience of the thinking activity itself, on the one hand, so passionate on the other the desire to find certainty and some sort of abiding permanence after the new science had discovered "la terre mouvante" (the shifting quicksand of the very ground  on which we stand), that it never occurred to him that no cogitatio and no cogito me cogitare, no consciousness of an acting self that had suspended all faith in the reality of its intentional objects, would ever have been able to convince him of his own reality had he actually been born in a desert, without a body and its senses to perceive "material" things and without fellow-creatures to assure him that what he perceived was perceived by them too. The Cartesian res cogitans, this fictitious creature, bodiless, senseless, and forsaken, would not even know that there is such a thing as reality and a possible distinction between real and the unreal, between the common world of waking life and the private non-world of our dreams...

I'll admit that a hard-core solipsistic position exists almost entirely as a philosophical thought experiment. (The pantheistic -- Dream of Devi -- alternative is at least logically plausible and, I think, the best way to consider Arendt's attack here.) In the Dream of Devi scenario, all that Arendt has said in the book so far about "appearance" and "seeming" and "being" takes place in a "reality" of thought. Arendt is criticizing Descartes based on the "realities" of a "physical existence" (that we experience with our very suspect sense organs and brains) that is itself under debate.

And it's really annoying being put in the position of having to defend Descartes.

It's also odd that she sites Kant but not David Hume when assaulting Descartes. I'm guessing that Kant is just doing a little destructive foundation work before building his own reality (or at least "thing-in-itself") affirming structure.

She actually starts this section with Husserl, which I need to return to,

p45 ...Husserl's basic and greatest discovery takes up in exhaustive detail the intentionality of all acts of consciousness, that is, the fact that no subjective arc is ever without an object: though the seen tree may be an illusion, for the the act of seeing it is an object nevertheless; though the dreamt-of landscape is visible only to the dreamer, it is the object of his dream. Objectivity is built into the very subjectivity of consciousness by virtue of intentionality. Conversely and with the same justness, one may speak of the intentionality of appearances and their built-in subjectivity. All objects because they appear indicate a subject, and, just as every subjective act has its intentional object, so every appearing object has its intentional subject. In Portmann's words, every appearance is a "conveyance for receivers"... Whatever appears is meant for a perceiver, a potential subject no less inherent in all objectivity than a potential object is inherent in the subjectivity of every intentional act.

p46 That appearance always demands spectators and thus implies an at least potential recognition and acknowledgement has far-reaching consequences for what we, appearing beings in a world of appearances, understand by reality, our own as well as that of the world. [Descartes could have taken this and used it to prove the necessity of God as universal spectator.] In both cases, our "perceptual faith," as Merleau-Ponty has called it, our certainty that what we perceive has an existence independent of the act of perceiving, depends entirely on the object's also appearing as such to others and being acknowledged by them. Without this tacit acknowledgement by others we would not even be able to put faith in the way we appear to ourselves. [Do these people not remember their dreams?]

This is why all solipsistic theories -- whether they radically claim that nothing but the self "exists" or, more moderately, hold that the self and its consciousness of itself are the primary objects of verifiable knowledge -- are out of tune with the most elementary data of our existence and experience. [*Looking for someone to throttle.* "Reality revealed by shadows on cave wall proved by elementary data of our existence and experience as revealed by those shadows!"] Solipsism, open or veiled, with or without qualifications, has been the most persistent and, perhaps, the most pernicious fallacy of philosophy even before it attained in Descartes the high rank of theoretical and existential consistency...

It would be unfair (and again, it's annoying being put in the position of having to be fair to Descartes) to accuse Descartes of having constructed a solipsistic straw-man -- because there's nothing wrong with the single point of unquestionable reality he starts with. Arendt seems to be hostile to Descartes for even raising (so well) the issue of solipsism despite his having raised it merely to bury it under assumptions about God. Is this because I'm not the only one who mutters curses to himself while reading those God guaranteed paragraphs that follow "I think, therefore I am"? Hume certainly wasn't buying it.


p49 Although everything that appears is perceived in the mode of it-seems-to-me, hence open to error and illusion, appearance as such carries with it a prior indication of realness. All sense experiences are normally accompanied by the additional, if usually mute, sensation of reality, and this despite the fact that none of our senses, taken in isolation, and no sense-object, taken out of context, can produce it...

p50 The reality of what I perceive is guaranteed by its worldly context, which includes others who perceive as I do, on the one hand, and by the working together of my five senses on the other. What since Thomas Aquinas we call common sense, the sensus communis, is a kind of sixth sense needed to keep my five senses together and guarantee that it is the "one faculty {that} extends to all objects of the five senses." This same sense, a mysterious "sixth sense" because it cannot be localized as a bodily organ, [why not just call it God, as Descartes does?] fits the sensations of my strictly private five senses -- so private that sensations in their mere sensational quality and intensity are incommunicable -- into a common world shared by others. The subjectivity of the it-seems-to-me is remedied by the fact that the same object also appears to others though its mode of appearance may be different. (It is the inter-subjectivity of the world, rather than similarity of physical appearance, that convinces men that they belong to the same species...) In a world of appearances, filled with error and semblance, reality is guaranteed by this three-fold commonness: the five senses, utterly different from each other, have the same object in common; members of the same species have the same context in common... and all other sense-endowed beings, though perceiving this object from utterly different perspectives, agree on its identity. Out of this threefold commonness arises the sensation of reality.

So, when in doubt about the reality of sense objects, we can decide the issue by polling some of those sense objects that we experience as speaking individuals similar to ourselves?

I was about to say that all this works fine if we are only concerned with objects as "objects of perception" -- as opposed to considering their reality independent of our perception -- but even that isn't entirely true. The one thing we do know about the "common sense" reality is that it is an illusion (illusions, really, since they are not all the same). This is especially true if you view reality at the atomic level or the level of Quantum Field Theory, but you don't even have to go that deep.

And when has philosophy ever been interested in establishing the common sense reality? What's key, at least for me, in this section, is the way Arendt has substituted her "sixth sense" for Descartes God-that-wouldn't-delude-us. This becomes the quicksand she is trying to construct her philosophy upon. 

To each of our five senses corresponds a specific, sensorily perceptible property of the world... [Synesthesia?] The sixth sense's corresponding worldly property is realness, and the difficulty with this property is that it cannot be perceived like other sensory properties. [Rather like faith.] The sense of realness is not a sensation strictly speaking; reality "is there even if we can never be certain that we know it" (Peirce,) for the "sensation" of reality, of sheer thereness, relates to the context in which single objects appear as well as to the context in which we ourselves as appearances exist among other appearing creatures. The context quo context never appears entirely; it is elusive, almost like Being, which quo Being never appears in a world filled with beings, with single entities. But Being, since Parmenides the highest concept of Western philosophy, is a thought-thing that we do not expect to be perceived by the senses or to cause a sensation, whereas realness is akin to sensation; a feeling of realness (or irreality) actually accompanies all the sensations of my sense, which without it would not make "sense." This is why Thomas Aquinas defined common sense, his "sensus communis," as an "inner sense" -- sensus interior -- that functioned as "the common root and principle of the exterior senses"...

When you find yourself falling back on Scholastic principles don't you need to stop and ask what else you are agreeing to? Isn't Arendt simply spelling out what Descartes took for granted when he asserted that God wouldn't deceive us? Isn't this sixth sense simply the way God tells us what's real?

From a Darwinian perspective (or context) I really have no problem with this line of argument. But this isn't a work of biology or sociology.  

229. A hint of Arendt

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The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Harcourt, originally published 1971

Wow! Is this a book I want to read. The Introduction alone could be a semester philosophy class. I don't even mind her talk about the "death of philosophy and metaphysics," since she also covers the death of "God." Like Disco, none of these concepts will ever really die.

A key part of the introduction is her re-translation of Kant's "verstand" to mean "intellect" not "understanding." I have to read this at least one more time. I'm not sure I agree with her on this or with where she's going with this, but this is the reason I think it's wise to pick the best translator rather than to try to learn a language and do an indifferent (at best) job yourself. Since she's started out with so much about the usual 19th century Germans, and, not surprisingly, Heidegger, I can't wait to see if she can help me understand what he's about.

It's not surprising, you could almost say it is on the banal side, that she starts by talking about the "banality of evil." It is interesting to see her parse that phrase. One thinks one knows what she meant, but of course she actually meant more... or at least the phrase came to mean more to her.

     

The gig economy

This being San Francisco, I can't walk to Peet's without seeing a couple ads for the latest start-up bringing something or other (or anything at all) to your door. What struck me today, for some reason, is that in many ways this is a return to the past. Think of all the "independent contractors" of the past who would bring vegetables or ice or pots and pans to your door no matter where you were. Or they would sharpen your knives or provide other services. The best literary record I know of that era, is when Proust writes about all the street vendors he could hear from the window of Marcel's parent's house in Paris.

It's like we are in some sort of cycle. All those people with their push carts or horse drawn wagons disappeared long ago due to the world wars or changes in the economy. But now the streets here are filled with bicycles carting coffee beans or meals or Goat knows what all over town, while there are probably even more cars stealthily doing the same thing. You can use an app to find a person to change a light bulb or walk your dog. I'm not sure I would call it progress, but as work goes, these jobs are probably better than many others in the service or even manufacturing sector. 

155. Last of Tisdale

Previous - 154. The Sutra...

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Violation, last

"Falling"

This is another essay about her family, mostly her older brother this time who spent most of his adult life skiing. 

p318 ...We learn to walk by falling; we learn to relax into gravity until we dance with it. Skiing is just another way to fall, and dance. In the inhuman snows of the high mountains, there is not much more one can do; surrender is your only choice.

I like this about gravity and falling. This is also what anything in orbit does, fall without hitting. With walking or roller skating or riding a bike or skiing, velocity is what we first use to beat gravity. (Ever notice how toddlers are always racing around?) On earth we eventually learn to go slow and even to stop without falling, but in space velocity is the only antidote to crashing.


Last weekend, around the time I was losing my expensive filling, I was talking to someone who had been living in Colorado when I did. He was going to the University of Colorado in Boulder while I was attending Martin Park Elementary school. What we had in common was a fondness for Boulder and Winter Park ski stories. I was not like Sallie's brother in either my level of skill or my degree of boldness. But I loved the mountain top first thing in the morning. For me skiing was just an excuse to get up on the mountain in the snow (and to spend time at the delightful lodge we always stayed at.) 

We've run into this type of person at least once before, Primo Levi's mountaineering friend Sandro from The Periodic Table. (I say "at least" because the young Oliver Sacks was a bit like this as well. And he was also chased by personal demons.)


"The Indigo City"

So much here to love. (This is about her growing up and believing she was naturally artistic but finally realizing she wasn't a painter or musician or photographer or really anything else. And then leaving her small town roots and discovering real art in the worlds great museums.) 

I recognize so much of this, though aside from a brief period of photography delusion (deflated by exposure to the works of the Westins and their circle in a gallery in Carmel), and a longer period of believing I was a great writer -- if I could only think of something I needed to say -- I don't recall being as invested in the need to be artistic. (I did, at the age she's writing about at the start of the essay, plan to be a forest ranger after all.) 

Her painfully unsuccessful artistic efforts, in the end, were the best class in art appreciation anyone could have devised. And, what she writes about the lives of geniuses not usually being enviable, is true enough. 

What I finally decided about writing, and I think this is true of all artistic ventures, is that these lives are for people who can't imagine another life. I haven't stuck with philosophy because I'm good at it or because the rewards (ha) are worth the investment, but because it is necessary for me. I didn't take a photograph for probably a decade or more. I was a bit relieved when I stopped trying to become a published writer -- technical writing doesn't count -- but you couldn't offer me anything to stop doing philosophy. That would be a deal breaker. (It occurs to me as I write this, that this is the answer to the question on that end of life questionnaire about when would you consider life to be not worth living. Though how would anyone else know if I were doing philosophy or not? Still no help.)

And I still prefer my story about my parent's "library." Besides my mother's murder mysteries, I learned when we were packing up the house that I was the only one to read the novels stashed away with the silverware in the big chest of drawers that matched the china cabinet. The books that I read so stealthily and carefully because of the dirty bits that, it turns out, no one but me knew where even there.

And we, or rather our parents, overlapped in providing us each with a set of The World Book Encyclopedia... or as I think of my set, The Time Machine. She doesn't make it clear at what age she got hers, but since she's five years younger, my set is probably better, as it reflects the 1950s and not even the 1960s.


"So Long As I Am With Others"

This is more what I expected from Tisdale from having discovered her with "The Sutra..." This is a nice combination of memoir and philosophy and it touches on some old favorites of mine like Prometheus and individuation. But she starts by describing a personal crisis when she was in her early twenties. 

Growing up you hear about puberty. You hear about mid-life crises and menopause, but I've yet to hear anyone mention this crisis of the young adult making the transition from puberty to early adult life. And yet nearly everyone struggles with it. Even me. This was one of the two times in my life where I, too, sought therapeutic help. (In my case I decided to just get on with it after realizing that my therapist had worse problems than I did.) I still don't know if this life crisis has a proper name. 

p347 Socrates said that one should simply be as one wishes to appear. But one self implies another, makes another; without two how can there be one? "Up to a point we can choose how to appear to others," wrote Hannah Arendt, who knew a thing or two about choices. "Living things make their appearance like actors on a stage." In hundreds of photographs, Arendt stares at the camera, ironic or solemn; she doesn't smile. She is alert to self-display, its possibilities. Its sorrows. Be as one wishes to appear -- an absurd idea. I don't know what I wish for, and I don't seem able to control the being part, either. I am alive and so I present myself to others. I align with Arendt -- up to a point, I choose. Trouble is I am often past that point; by existing, I have crossed it.
...

I've added Hannah Arendt to my reading list, especially The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Life of the Mind. The following is a quote from Wiki about the latter book,

Life of the Mind went beyond her previous work concerning the vita activa. In her discussion of thinking she focuses mainly on Socrates and his notion of thinking as a solitary dialogue between Me and Myself. This appropriation of Socrates leads her to introduce novel concepts of conscience (which gives no positive prescriptions, but instead, tells me what I cannot do if I would remain friends with myself when I re-enter the two-in-one of thought where I must render an account of my actions to myself) and morality (an entirely negative enterprise concerned with non-participation in certain actions for the sake of remaining friends with one's self).

p348 [Following talk of the modern world of constant photography] ...Up to a point, I think I can choose how I appear to myself. But most of us glance at ourselves and glance away, unsure. One wants to own oneself, be oneself, but how? This is how I look. I present myself to myself, and what a disappointment. On certain days, the mirror shows me a conjoined twin I've come to hate and can't escape... 

p349 I would hide from Diogenes's lamp; my secret fear is that this is it, this its as real as I get, this false and slippery face like a fun-house mirror, attenuated, swollen, halved. I am mirrored inside and out, stuck in this meaty machine and not always happy about that, and stuck also in this consternation. I am split: observing, observed. Observing the observer, aware of being observed. Helplessly distant. "So long as I am together with others, barely conscious of myself," (Arendt again; I always think of her as the old woman, weary, a bit gnomish) "I am as I appear to others." Barely conscious?
...

Consciousness of self is the soul of individuation, that heartless gift of Titan or devil. Genesis 3:7: "At that moment their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves." 

Now I'm imagining that the knowledge of Good and Evil came with a little traveler's sewing kit with thread and needle and a button or two.

p350 Until the first century of the Common Era, there were no full-length mirrors, no way to see one's entire body. People saw only parts of themselves. Imagine that first time: at last the whole... there, upright, lit, still. Complete, or seeming so. At last an answer to the burning question: How do I look?...
...

p351 I seem to have lost years of my life when I wasn't looking. Rilke prayed: "Fling the emptiness out of your arms / into the spaces we breathe." Pay attention. My selves flash out of emptiness; they jostle like a crowd at the fair, giving way, pushing back. I am less concerned with the place from which they appear -- with whether it is a nothing or a something, with whether knowing would be a comfort or a nauseating vastness outside my reach -- then with the becoming. [the unreality and subjectivity and ephemerality of self] Who wins today? The self who displays (who preens, poses, curries favor) or the self who watches (wonders at, pities)? The judge? The one who flees the very sight? Selves multiply like layers of paint, [on a canvas] and in the crowd it seems impossible to wholly become one, to completely become, anything, even for a moment. Impossible to be complete. Rilke, who wrote a great deal about the struggle of being and appearing, spent his life creating a veneer; he was his own brand, the brand Rilke, a narcissist and philanderer; Rilke was a bit of a creep. 

This sounds a bit like Goethe or Byron or how many other artists. How much of art and performance is simple a wanting to be seen, and seen in a particular -- not necessarily revealing -- way. And given what we've learned about the tenuous and ad hoc nature of self, isn't this why there is a trend in film and literature -- going back at least as far as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein -- to ponder the nature of robotic or AI self-consciousness? 

Who is it -- what is it? -- that knows the difference between itself and another? That knows itself to be a self, this face to be its face? What knows its own hiddenness, its self-deception? I am me because I know myself to be me, but how? Here I am; I am me partly and confusingly because of what I know myself not to be; what I feel as difference. I and me because I am not you. You are the other, forever an other, irrevocably not-me. And thank god for that. I am irrevocably not other -- and yet I seem always to be the tiniest fraction removed from being this. (What would it be like to be you? To be her? Him? To be, for just one damned second, not me.) 

Isn't this part of the appeal of intoxicants? Something that makes us not quite me -- though it could also be more me. The dance of identity, whether Freud's id- ego-super-ego three-step or the even more confusing ones of Multiple Personality Disorder and schizophrenia, just leave us all still more confused.

p352 And Socrates be damned, most of the time we are not trying to be as we wish ourselves to appear, but the opposite: even more expert at acting... The urge to claim a space for the self collides and colludes with the urge to construct a self to fit the space. We are not entirely in charge here; habits long lost to memory are driving the bus; we wake up in the midst of action. And the actor is only the self, of course; how could it be otherwise? [This sounds so much like what we've learned from studying neurological disaster of self where, the self tries to make sense of even a total lack of memory.] There is nothing this wormy ego does that isn't mine. All of it -- growth and loss like a rash; endless rebirth of a self beyond boring, refusing to die. The mask, the play, the rehearsed grin, the ritual gasp, the parsing of threats -- the certainty of not wholly belonging to any other; of being never wholly with. All mine. 

I'm almost certain I'm seeing something here that the author didn't intend. That like the Marxist commentators on Faust, I'm finding my hobby-horse everywhere I look. But still, you can see in the words above that quality of impermanence the self seems to have in general and especially when memory fails. Even when the new self seems to be entirely distinct from the prior self (so not so much a rebirth as a succeeding of the previous administration) it refuses to die, to surrender it's "self" for the prior "self."

Grieve... for the inability to be true, that one is never authentic. One is only, in Arendt's words again, "an appearance among appearances"; nothing and everything is false, authentic, whole, broken. More or less. "Our modern identity crisis could be resolved only by never being alone and never trying to think." We're working on that. She believed, or claimed to, that we are all the same in some buried place, that a kind of psychic fundament exists, a ceaseless biology of mind -- a sameness of selves as our cells are the same. (They are not, though, our cells: not exactly the same, any more than a blade of grass in a meadow is like another.)

We claim to want this place where we are the same -- claim that we would run to meet each other there. Finding that space is the purpose of our lives, we say, glibly taking each other's hands and swaying in affirmation. Kumbaya. Perhaps we mean it. I think I do. I think I don't; I am not certain about this. [This can go in so many directions: the German Volk, raves, "Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun," the mystical state people sometimes fall into and that religion sometimes offers for sale to monks and other seekers after holiness.] Where we are the same is, for now, just mine; this space remains mine alone. I may not want to share...

p353 Facing those others who believe themselves to know me, I smile and say hello. How nice to see you. a me speaks, a you listens -- at least with half an ear -- to words upon which we might in part agree. What is intimacy but having a few more words in our shared vocabulary than we have with the others to whom we turn in longing? -- though the meaning of each word is always a matter of debate, and one we no longer have the heart to carry on because of the risk we will find there is no agreement after all. The words hunker down like ticks, digging in, thick with cliche, the giant delicacy of the social sphere. You are so far away, your desires so different and vague, and language is little more than the demilitarized zone in which we try to negotiate some unstable peace. Never mind that these are old concerns, that they are solipsistic and infinitely regressive, that many good minds have followed them into tiny corners from which they seem unable to escape. Communication is the second self, or third, always false; the first one cowers or cries out, depending. 

Is "solipsistic" really the word she wants there? For the true solipsist the communication problem shouldn't really exist since there is no "other." Mind you, by this same logic I shouldn't have a problem hearing or understanding things in my supposedly self-created dreams -- which is a frustratingly common occurrence.

I say to a friend, I want to be done with the witness, and he turns away, hissing, I want to obliterate it. He would like to die as a self aware of itself, in order to be seen as a self at all. We can be exactly as we long to be, appear exactly as we are, only by not knowing we have appeared -- and what a thought of heaven that is. Our struggle to be at peace with ourselves would be gone; we would no longer be trying to be ourselves at all. Awareness without reflection -- animal life. Or perhaps more like the... heliotropic plant, quivering toward the light. Responding, but never having to act. The dream of extinction while still blessedly alive.
...

Individuation is indeed the leitmotif of this essay.

p354 ...For a long time I thought love meant not feeling alone. I thought love would cure the bounded self. In moments, so it seems: transparent collapse into the space of another...
...

p355 We are never visible to others exactly , nor is the world wholly visible to us; the shell is always there in between. I look out through a fogged window. So I accept that mine is a partial view, the product of untold errors and limits; I accept that I can't see all of a thing because I can't see everything. I accept that no one can be seen, and so I believe that no one will every wholly see me -- and what relief, at once, to know this. So I will call myself planetary, cosmic; my darkness hidden in the darkness, in the far side. (I do not, of course, really accept this. I am being as I long to appear. I will pretend this is some kind of consolation, that this is the point, that it is due to our largeness, the very size of our selves, that we are each larger than each other's views.)

Just last meeting the book club was talking about the impossibility of admitting new members because they wouldn't have read the books that are now a shared language we use to discuss each new book. This blog, or rather this series of blogs, has the same problem as I continue to refer back all the way to The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. And my fondness for Ryecroft is in part my delight in sharing a language based on reading the Classics. Did Tisdale even touch on this problem of education?

When Tisdale invoked solipsism above, I believe she had in mind our isolation from everything outside our own minds. But I think she is, like Kant, comfortable with the notion that, even though we may have no exact knowledge of the thing-in-itself, there's no reason to doubt the independent existence of that "thing." True solipsism, in my view, is not nearly so trusting. 

The unknowability of anything external to ourselves is first a sensory problem but, on top of that, there is the problem of sharing thoughts about those external things. We become like Eskimos trying to have a simple conversation about snow with people whose language doesn't go beyond "wet," "powder," and "yellow." 

Just as I don't have the patience to investigate the views on science of National Socialism, I suspect, but am not going to confirm, that the endless texts and dogmas of religions world wide, are at least in part an attempt to synchronize the minds of believers so that they will understand key words and phrases the same way. (If this is true then Protestantism indicates the total failure of Roman Catholic efforts in this regard.)

And speaking of solipsism, can you think of another explanation for Tisdale ending this collection with this particular -- previously unpublished -- essay? Who but me would find this the perfect ending? The cherry on top? Which must mean that the rest of you are merely figments of my imagination. But let me say that you're all doing a wonderful job. Keep up the good work.

Painting

I'm taking a lunch break but almost everything is painted. There's a little trim and some touch-up still to do before I start putting things back in place. What's odd is how familiar it looks, since I've been imagining this for almost six months. What's funny is that I doubt that anyone but me will notice the difference. It would take someone like Temple Grandin, with an eidetic memory, to identify what's different about the room. And it kept occurring to me as I was prepping and painting that most of the wall surface will be covered by furniture and art -- this is a lot of work for very little visual effect. Rather like our seismic retrofit last summer.

This painting is really mainly a test for my 10 year plan upgrade. When everything is back in place it will be a little easier to imagine what the room could look like in 10 years when it's all re-painted and some furniture and junk is removed. I'm so tempted to move up my schedule. I would like to see things simplified and down-sized. (Down-sizing from such a tiny apartment isn't really the right word. Minimalizing or Simplifying might be better. What I have in mind is getting rid of everything I don't really need.)


Hours later...

It is done. The furniture is restored and everything is back in place. Some things are rearranged, and all my painting stuff is put away. 

Not only is it a success, it pretty much demands a follow-up project where I paint the trim of the larger, double window to match. Now I have to work out the logistics of that. The furniture is much easier to move, but I still have to figure out where it can go -- and where all the books can go -- to leave room for working and a ladder. Next week.

Actually, this is kind of clever... or would be if I had planned it. I paint one wall and a bit of window trim and my room looks noticeably (to me) different and better. This should hold me until I take the whole room apart and repaint everything in 10 years.


Which reminds me about age and planning. I'm doing some long term financial planning, which in some ways is similar to what I do for my homeowners association, and with the same 30 year forecasts, except that in both cases I'm aware that past 15 years the part I play gets increasingly problematic. My (occasional) upstairs neighbors are doing relatively well for people a bit over 15 years older than I am, but they've had to stop doing things they did routinely even five years ago. I have very mixed feelings about the possibility that I won't be around to manage the next re-painting of our building. My personal 10 year plan is based in part on most of the paint in my apartment being 20 years old now (I painted it and it's holding up great) and will be 30 years old then while, in my experience, people's ability to handle physical tasks like painting diminish after they hit 75. If I get my apartment in great shape then, it should be fine for the rest of my life, and still looking good for the next lucky Below Market Rate lottery winner.

When I realized how long my recently replaced filling lasted, I quickly did the math and realized I probably would have to deal with this little ordeal again. Re-painting the building could go either way. 

The other problem for planning is that past 75-80, the game can change in unpredictable ways. Of course, for some people it changes even earlier than that, but for most people it's largely the same-old, same-old until then. This reality is made manifest in the options offered at your better retirement communities: independent living, assisted living, nursing/memory facilities. 

It's indicative of what I'm reading/watching of late that this process of accelerating -- and not in a good way -- change reminds me of spacetime around a black hole. Even in the accretion disk, things are going pretty much as they always have. The warp is getting steeper and steeper but that's been happening for so long you hardly notice. You probably think, "I'm getting so good at riding this." Like a cocky skateboarder about to discover that there is no extension into the shadow of the pipe he's riding. Next thing you know -- or not, who knows -- space and time are becoming confused and you see Einstein waving goodbye for an eternity before you (maybe) fall into that wacky quantum world.

So now I can justify my interest in QCD, and QED, as part of my future planning. When I think I've finally grasped QCD will probably be the signal that it's time to lock me away in a memory facility.

Next - 156. The end of garden tending