The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: self improvement

  • On Going

    Going somewhere this 4th of July weekend? Traveling? Here’s an article to take with you, read along the way: “The Case Against Travel,” in which the contemporary philosopher Agnes Callard strikes out to strike out travel. She begins citing surprising testimonies on travel hate from Chesterton, Emerson, Socrates, Kant, Samuel Johnson; but the best is this, from Fernando Pessoa:

    “I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. . . . The idea of travelling nauseates me. . . . Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! . . . Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . . Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel.”

    The Weekend Essay: “The Case Against Travel”
    “It turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best.”
    By Agnes Callard
    June 24, 2023 The New Yorker

    Of course, we must ask what is meant by “travel.” Callard is not talking about having to leave town for another to attend a wedding or funeral, attend a family reunion, or interview for a job. She’s talking mainly about tourism, travel for the sake of travel. Going somewhere. And thinking that getting there somehow improves our nature. It doesn’t, Callard argues, convincingly for this homebody, anyway.

    Why folks still want to go somewhere puzzles me. The recent pandemic, still simmering on the back-burners of an overheated health care system, combined with the now certain and overwhelming and ongoing effects of global warming and climate changes, the social and economic unrest like swarms of yellow jackets infesting our cities, ongoing world wide war and immigration and refugee catastrophes – you would think folks would be content hiding out at home. Could it be people are unhappy at home? Unable to relax? Can’t get no satisfaction?

    What to do? But of all the game changing events just listed, the pandemic possibly is most responsible for changing habits across the board of socio-demographic freedom of movement choice. And, surprise and silver lining, we find improvement in the move away from normal: working from home, on-line shopping, neighborhood garage band, do-it-yourself cultural improvement. Eschewing the downtown or suburban mall crowds and visiting the local thrift store to satisfy one’s shopping urges. Church in the park.

    And we might wonder what Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality technologies have in store for us down the road. Case in point? The Google Arts & Culture app, where you can take a virtual tour of the Lincoln Memorial, play games in nature, explore the art in Barcelona; play with words with music, fonts, and video; take a hike along The Camino de Santiago; explore Iconic Indian Monuments; discover and discuss The Lomellini Family; do crosswords, artwork, writing.

    Of course, on the other hand, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau said:

    “I can only meditate when I am walking, when I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.”

    Rousseau quote taken from the Callard article; I don’t know the original source.

    Hard to imagine Rousseau on a 14 hour flight somewhere, legs bent as if in shackles, thinking, I could walk at home, where a study of physics might show me I’ve not even begun to discover the miracles of existence close at hand. What are those miracles? I don’t know, but I’m happy to stay put this summer and smell them out.

  • David Brooks and How to Be a Better Person

    David Brooks, in “The Sydney Awards: Part I” (New York Times, Dec. 19, 2011), selects the “best magazine essays of the year.” Like the recent Rolling Stone article, “The 101 Greatest Guitarists of All Time,” Brooks’s piece is another list; it has become a journalistic genre, the creation of year-end lists. And, as we said in our post on the greatest guitarists, lists are made for argument. But Brooks doesn’t even let us get to his list before starting his argument, to wit: “Anybody interested in being a better person will click the links to these essays in the online version of this column, and read attentively.” We’re all for reading, writing, and critical thinking, and hopeful that the Toads blog illuminates our curiosity, if nothing else, but wish becoming a better person were that easy.

    If, as Norman O. Brown argued, “the fall is into language” (Love’s Body, 257), it’s hard to see how more of it is going to help matters. But we were reminded of something else we read this week, Elif Batuman’s “The Sanctuary: The world’s oldest temple and the dawn of civilization” (New Yorker, Dec. 19, 2011). Elif asks a penetrating question, which links us to a previous post on Brooks, coincidentally: have humans improved over time? Elif puts it this way: “Was the human condition ever fundamentally different from the way it is now?” (82 – but it’s behind the New Yorker paywall). Entire belief systems, Elif argues, depend on how we answer questions having to do with human progress. Is it possible that not only are we unable to improve, but we can only get worse? We see some evidence for this, but if we had to choose, we hold with those who think we’re the same as we’ve ever been.

    But maybe Brooks is right, and humans simply have not read enough. Who knows, but we doubt it. When it comes to improvement, to becoming a better person, we’re also reminded of the compliment scene in the film “As Good As It Gets” (1997). “You make me want to be a better man,” the human-overdosed Jack Nicholson character, Melvin, tells Carol (Helen Hunt). No more accurate definition of love have we ever read.

    Perhaps we reach a point where we are as good as we want to be, and we stop reading and writing, and that’s as good as it gets. But Melvin doesn’t say that Carol makes him a better person, only that she makes him want to be a better person, and we see him struggle. And Brooks doesn’t say that reading does makes us better persons; and maybe what he meant is merely that those interested in self-improvement might find reading helpful.

    Something else: Brooks’s article is a bit confusing, also, for what, exactly, are the Sydney awards? They seem to be something of his own making, but we also find the Sydney Hillman awards. There are apparently two Sydneys, then, both with the purpose of providing interested persons links to reading that is as good as it gets.

    Follow-up: Brooks wrote his article in two parts. Here’s part two: “The Sydney Awards, Part II” (New York Times, Dec. 22, 2011).

    Related: David Brooks and The Plaque of Alienation; or, the Consciousness Bubble