"What's that thing, I think, Voltaire said — 'Not that I should succeed, but that my friends should fail'?"

Said Duncan Trussell, near the end of a new 3-hour Joe Rogan podcast. 

Voltaire?! 

I love Duncan Trussell, who is also, and very obviously, Joe Rogan's favorite guest, but I think he's got the attribution wrong. 

I associate it with Gore Vidal, but in the form "It is not enough to succeed; others must fail." No friends in that picture. 

But Quote Investigator looked into a set of similar quotes, one of which was "It is not enough to succeed; one’s friends must fail."

I think it's better without dragging the friend relationship into the concept, but the oldest appearance of the approximate idea was: "Now that I’ve grown old, I realize that for most of us it is not enough to have achieved personal success. One’s best friend must also have failed." 

That's Somerset Maugham (quoted in 1959). There's an older appearance if you count this as the same thing: "In the misfortune of our best friends, we always find something which is not displeasing to us." That's La Rochefoucauld (in the 17th century). He also said, "We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others." 

Gore Vidal's name comes up in a 1973 NYT article by Wilfrid Sheed. Vidal is quoted saying "Every time a friend succeeds I die a little," and then Sheed goes on to credit La Rochefoucauld for the quote, "it is not enough to succeed; a friend must also fail." 

The first use of the form that I think is best — "It is not enough to succeed; others must fail" — comes from Iris Murdoch in 1973.

Anyway, leave Voltaire out of it. He wouldn't say that. Would he?

IN THE EMAIL: 2 readers — policraticus and dksd — independently thought of this New Yorker cartoon by Leo Callum (from 1997):

"The Louvre museum in Paris said Friday it has put nearly half a million items from its collection online for the public to visit free of charge."

"As part of a major revamp of its online presence, the world's most-visited museum has created a new database of 482,000 items at collections."  

Yahoo reports.  

Here's the site.  

Here's the first thing I looked for:

I wanted to see that because I have a strong memory of drawing it (in person) and only remembered my drawing (blogged before, here): 

ADDED: Oh, no, wait. It's this one — an older, nakeder Voltaire. This is the "portrait absolument fidèle" that I drew:

"I'm happiness blogging today. Nothing interested me in the news. It's a good move to make when nothing in the news is interesting."

"I stumbled into a strategy, that is. I thought I'd just put up a quote from this book I was reading — Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers — and the quote was about happiness, so I started casting about for happiness items. Happily, there was no end to bloggable things."

That's something I wrote on March 16, 2012 — Facebook just reminded me. I loved getting that prod, as I engage in a higher level of seclusion this morning...



There's so much anxiety mixed with boredom these days that I thought I'd take you back to that happiness day, 8 years ago:

1. "There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy" — the post title is a quote from Robert Louis Stevenson. Much more to that quote at the link. I'll just add: "[I]f a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle he should remain. It is a revolutionary precept... and within practical limits, it is one of the most incontestable truths in the whole Body of Morality."

2. "And... that is the secret of happiness and virtue — liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny" — a quote from The Director in "Brave New World."

3. "I have told myself a hundred times that I would be happy if I were as stupid as my neighbor, and yet I would want no part of that kind of happiness. But yet, upon reflection, it seems that to prefer reason to happiness is to be quite insane" — said "The Good Brahmin" in the story by Voltaire.

4. "I broke my theme. Something made me laugh"/"Then you didn't break your theme. Something made you laugh. Something made you happy. Something made you smile." A real-life colloquy. The first commenter didn't understand that post, and, funnily enough, I don't either now. Oh, I think it was maybe the next post: The headline, in Forbes, "Santorum Promises Broad War on Porn," which required me to blog about the double entendre ("broad war"). That was good for laughing, but not really about happiness.

5. "'5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy (But Won't)'/You already know what they are going to be, don't you? It's interesting to be able to think something while simultaneously knowing the opposite."

6. "Happiness is more like knowledge than like belief. There are lots of things we believe but don’t know. Knowledge is not just up to you, it requires the cooperation of the world beyond you — you might be mistaken. Still, even if you’re mistaken, you believe what you believe. Pleasure is like belief that way. But happiness isn’t just up to you. It also requires the cooperation of the world beyond you. Happiness, like knowledge, and unlike belief and pleasure, is not a state of mind" — a quote from the David Sosa, whose field is philosophy.

7. "A large Gallup poll has found that by almost any measure, people get happier as they get older..." — a survey from 2008. We are all only ever getting older, but the phenomenon doesn't kick in until age 50. After that, it gets better and better.

8. "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.... By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men...."

9. "Romney's Religion of Happiness vs. Gingrich's Religion of Grievance" — a Sarah Posner headline at Religion Dispatches. I'm happy that I don't have to bother with the feelings of Romney and Gingrich anymore.

10. A post about my favorite Beatles song, "Happiness Is a Warm Gun."

11. I also don't have to think too much about Rick Santorum, but back then, he said: “This is the mantra of the left: I have a right to do what I want to do” and “We have a whole culture that is focused on immediate gratification and the pursuit of happiness ... and it is harming America.” He took the position that the Founders idea of "the pursuit of happiness" was “to do the morally right thing.”

12. "The Happiness Bank."

13. The acronym PERMA represents the 5 components of happiness.

14. "Is there a happiness mantra or motto that you’ve found very helpful?"
"Years ago, when I was researching an article on research into stress, one social scientist passed on a simple tip: 'At some point every day, you have to say, "No more work."' No matter how many tasks remain undone, you have to relax at some point and enjoy the evening."

15. "Happy people rarely correct their faults... they consider themselves vindicated, since fortune endorses their evil ways" — wrote Le Duc de La Rochefoucauld.

"not to get panglossian but I think..."

not to get panglossian but I think these hearings are helping the Ds become the party of wholesomeness and patriotism and the Rs the party of grievance and pettiness. that would be a disaster watershed moment for the party of Reagan.

— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) November 19, 2019

Who's Litman? His Twitter profile says: "Washington Post columnist. Former US Attorney, DOJ official.Teach con law at UCSD and UCLA. Practice law @CCWhistleblower. Exec. prod. & host, @talkingfedspod."

This tweet is such a perfect example of cocooned liberal self-love. If there is one thing that has given me energy from Day 1 of this blog, it is my aversion to cocooned liberal self-love.

The word in that tweet that really gets me is "wholesomeness." Imagine staring at Adam Schiff for hours thinking, oh, that is so reassuring, he's so gosh-darn wholesome.

I like the "panglossian," and not just because I'm elite-educated enough to know what it means. Click my Voltaire tag to check my credibility. But I looked up "panglossian" in the OED anyway, in the hope of finding some good quotes. The best one is from Thomas Hardy (1922): "Should anything of this sort in the following adumbrations seem ‘queer’—should any of them seem to good Panglossians to embody strange and disrespectful conceptions of this best of all possible worlds, I apologize; but cannot help it."

Absorbed in the OED, I looked up "cocoon." When did the silky larva-spun case break out into the butterfly of figurative usage? The OED says1865 (D. Masson Recent Brit. Philos.): "That power of thinking which has involved itself in such a vast cocoon of wonders." And 1870 (J. R. Lowell My Study Windows): "The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts."

ADDED: I clicked on my Voltaire tag and noticed this drawing of a bust of Voltaire (which I scrawled many years ago at the Louvre and blogged in the first year of blogging):



And I got something out of this previously blogged Voltaire quote: "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." I don't know if that's patriotic and wholesome, but it's great support for the proposition that Donald Trump does not rule over us. You can totally criticize that guy as much as you want. It's strongly encouraged!

"The whole bizarre situation" — of emotional support animals on airplanes — "is a reminder of why trust matters so much to a well-functioning society."

"The best solution, of course, would be based not on some Transportation Department regulation but on simple trust. People who really needed service animals could then bring on them planes without having to carry documents. Maybe a trust-based system will return at some point. But it won’t return automatically. When trust breaks down and small bits of dishonesty become normal, people need to make a conscious effort to restore basic decency."

Writes David Leonhardt in "It’s Time to End the Scam of Flying Pets" (NYT).

The best solution...

Voltaire said: The best is the enemy of the good. ("Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.")

I don't see how we're supposed to get to trust, when in a huge system, like airline transportation, you're always going to get some cheaters and it doesn't take many — 1%? — to create a problem like the one symbolized by Dexter the emotional-support peacock (picture at the NYT link).

And I'm not convinced trust is the answer. People need to be observant and skeptical.

I'll quote John Stuart Mill now: "Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing."

"Almost every journalist has met people like Mr. McLemore, sources who email you under pseudonyms with tips a little too good to be true."

"Often they seem to mostly want someone to talk to, and to have their experiences validated by a journalist, whose job, after all, is to decide what’s important and true. Most reporters would stop taking those calls when the story ideas don’t bear fruit, but not [Brian] Reed. He finds [John B.] McLemore’s life important in and of itself, and a whole world opens up to him."

Writes Amanda Hess (in the NYT) about the new podcast "S-Town." She avoids spoilers. You can listen to all 7 episodes here.

I highly recommend it. I listened to the whole thing in 3 days and immediately went back to Episode 1 to relisten (and am up to Episode 3). I consider it a work of art — perhaps a great work of art. The second go-round will tell. The first time through, you're pulled along by wanting to figure out who all these people are and what happened. There are layers of revelations. On re-listen, you see the first hints of what is to come. You see the repetitions of themes — such as time (McLemore is a restorer of clocks, sundials have sad inscriptions about time). You know as characters show up and start speaking in their own way from their own perspective what part they will play in the whole story. If it is a great work of art, it will be better the second time. That's my test.

I'm reading some other articles about "S-Town." Aja Romano has a piece in Vox with a headline that overstates the argument: "S-Town is a stunning podcast. It shouldn't have been made." The text says: "I’m not sure it should have been made." One might say that Reed invested so much of his time — speaking of time — gathering audio and got such great material that he just had to use it, and he processed it brilliantly. It may be so good because Reed, et al, were so desperate to justify using what they had. And McLemore's vivid raving is so wonderful, so fascinating, that it's hard to say it should be suppressed for the reason that you will know if you get to the end of episode 2.

Here are links to the Reddit threads discussing the show episode-by-episode. The top comment at the linked page is:

I wish I had a cousin like Tyler's uncle Jimmy to be my own personal hype man whenever I talk.

"Yeah!"

"Yes sir!"

"You goddamn right!"

Is there an ethical problem or are we free to enjoy Uncle Jimmy? Here's how Hess in the fit-to-print NYT referred to him: "Uncle Jimmy, who communicates exclusively through shouted affirmations." Jimmy is a man with a bullet lodged in his head.

Katy Waldman in Slate says that McLemore "embodies rightwing fantasies about the judgmental elitism of the left." Don't misread that. McLemore is obsessed with everything that's wrong with the world, especially global warming. He rants about it continually, enlarging talk on just about any subject into all the terrible things that are happening in the world. That is, he seems to be a lefty that popped out of rightwinger's fervid caricature. But "S-Town" isn't making a hero of him because he's into lefty issues. In fact, the show lets it become clear that his ravings on these subjects is symptomatic of his devastating personal problems.

Beyond clocks, McLemore also tended to his garden — lots of flowers and an elaborate circular hedge maze. People have found the maze on Google maps, and you can see photographs here.

Despite all the horror at the troubles of the world and the refuge in gardening, the show never mentions Voltaire's "cultivate your garden" resolution of "Candide." But the show does have literary references, notably the William Faulkner story "A Rose for Emily," which I was motivated to read yesterday. The story is mentioned early on, and every episode ends with the beautiful recording "A Rose for Emily" by The Zombies. Listen to that here. That's from the "Odessey and Oracle" album, which came out 50 years ago. Talk about time! (The Zombies are touring, playing the music from that album, and I hear they're great. They'll be in Madison on April 15th. Get your tickets here. I've got mine.)

The stretch-pierced earlobe + snake problem.

"I was holding my #SNAKE and his #DUMB ASS saw a hole, which just so happened to be my fuckin #EARLOBE, and thought that it would be a bright idea to #ATTEMPT to make it through... "

Facebooking from the emergency room, with photograph.

To remove that image from your mind, I leave you with these snake quotes:

1. "'Where are the people?' resumed the little prince at last. 'It’s a little lonely in the desert…' 'It is lonely when you’re among people, too,' said the snake.'" — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

2. "I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?" — Voltaire (Candide: or, Optimism)

3. "Don't touch me, I'm full of snakes."  — Jack Kerouac

"You really should read it, Althouse, as it's an unusual and excellent book."

"I don't know how any cartoon could begin to touch the substance of the book. When my wife was first pregnant I read it aloud to her to help her relax at night. I thought it had a positive message of hope and regeneration. Other than the warren getting gassed, I don't see any particular darkness in it."

Said The Cracker Emcee in the comments to yesterday's post marking the death of the author of that 70s bestseller, "Watership Down."

I had said:

I've never read the book or seen the movie, but I just watched that 3-minute trailer. Man, the 70s were dark. Good lord! Who would want to see that?...

I tried reading a page of Adams's book "Traveller" -- the story of the Civil War as told by Robert E. Lee's horse, and it was unreadable. The horse is speaking in an American Southern dialect that's ridiculous and a chore.

No offense to the old man. I'm glad he had a good experience being a father encouraged by his daughters and finding huge success. Not my cup of tea, but so what?

I don't get the argument that I should read "Watership Down." I snubbed it in the 70s. Why must I go through the trouble of snubbing it again? There's zero chance I would read that thing. Well, maybe if Meade insisted on reading it to me when I was pregnant and struggling with an inability to relax and a shortage of hope and regeneration ideas. There are about 10 conditions in the previous sentence, you should see, and not one of them is close to occurring.

Meade does sometimes read to me in bed when I'm done using my eyes for the day, but it's never an animal fable. Last night, it was "2016 Was the Year the Feminist Bubble Burst/We thought women would break new ground in 2016. We were wrong" by Michelle Goldberg at Slate. ("For the last couple of years, feminism has been both ubiquitous and improbably glamorous.... Young women rebelled against the small indignities that make even the most privileged female lives taxing....")

And that wasn't about relaxing or looking for hope. The book I'm reading with my eyeballs right now is "Candide."

"There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunegonde: if you had not been put into the Inquisition: if you had not walked over America: if you had not stabbed the Baron: if you had not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado: you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts."

The return of the Pelikan.

"Wonderful chunky bottle. I shall be keeping it long after the ink has been drunk."

Says a commenter at the Amazon page for No-Shellac India Black Fountain Pen Ink, and it does look good, judging from the bottle.

But it's a touchy business, looking for a serious, dark black ink that will work in a fountain pen. I'm seeing a wellspring of positive opinion for Noodler's Black Waterproof Fountain Pen Ink. And then there's Pelikan Drawing Ink, #518 Black Fount India, which calls out to me because of that name, Pelikan, which that's what got me searching for ink in the first place: I was thinking about that Pelikan fountain pen that I lost 30 years ago.

I'd used that pen to take notes and doodle in the margins throughout law school, 1978-1981....



Maybe I wouldn't have scored so high on so many law school exams if I hadn't inscribed my scattered thoughts with such powerful ink. If I'd written in Bic ball-point or Flair felt-tip like so many others, maybe I wouldn't have been able to launch myself into lawprofessordom.

Admitting I'd lost that empowering Pelikan, I went to the University Bookstore, which had a glass case full of pens. I chose a Mont Blanc pen that (like the old Pelikan) had a 14k gold nib. It never flowed quite the same way, but for a while it handled the thick India ink. It got me through Amsterdam. And it worked for the 1996 political conventions:




Those were different times. Different... and the same. An expert could observe that the delegates didn't respond much to foreign policy because "We have no enemies." An interviewer could be surprised that a journalism expert watched not only C-SPAN and the networks, but had the Internet going too. And yet Democrats were railing about guns in terms of military-style weapons and the only decent use being hunting, and Republicans wanted to intone a list of traditional values.

But the Mont Blanc got draggy after a few years of India ink. The whole point of the fountain pen was to transcend friction while leaving a super-solid line, to make it as easy as possible for you your hand and, simultaneously, your eyes. I wanted that feeling of ease. I wanted the Pelikan I had in law school! I switched to disposable India ink felt-tip pens. Those scraped over the surface of the paper in such a horrible cloddy way that it pains me to look at the notebooks I made with them, like this image of a bust of Voltaire, seen at the Louvre (and blogged before, with complaints about the pen):



I'd forgotten — and that old post reminds me — that I did later buy another Pelikan pen and then, immediately lost it. It was hard not to believe it would turn up, and then, gradually to shift into thinking I only deserved a good fountain pen if I could find that one, which is surely somewhere in the house. Then I got to blogging and digital photography and paid less and less attention to not drawing as a problem.

And yet, today, I was walking along the lake path — my favorite walk — thinking about leaving lawprofessordom — Altexit — and thoughts of the Pelikan returned to my mind. Why shouldn't I buy a new Pelikan? It's easy enough to find on Amazon. No need to go peering into glass cases minded by sales clerks who don't really want to talk about 14k gold nibs and fountain India with someone who cares too much about such things. I ordered the pen. I ordered the ink. I've got plenty of incomplete notebooks.

50 years ago today: the Vatican abolished its List of Prohibited Books.

"The 20th and final edition appeared in 1948, and the Index [Librorum Prohibitorum] was formally abolished on 14 June 1966 by Pope Paul VI...."

The aim of the list was to protect the faith and morals of the faithful by preventing the reading of heretical and immoral books....

The Index included a number of authors and intellectuals whose works are widely read today in most leading universities and are now considered as the foundations of science, e.g. Kepler's New Astronomy, his Epitome of Copernican Astronomy, and his World Harmony were quickly placed on the Index after their publication. Other noteworthy intellectual figures on the Index include Jean-Paul Sartre, Montaigne, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, André Gide, Emanuel Swedenborg, Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, John Milton, John Locke, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, and Hugo Grotius. Charles Darwin's works were never included.

More of the list here, along with some discussion of what was not included:

Not on the Index were Aristophanes, Juvenal, John Cleland, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence. According to Wallace et al., this was because the primary criterion for banning the work was anticlericalism, blasphemy and heresy.

"But the problem with thinking of Mars as a fallback planet (besides the lack of oxygen and air pressure and food and liquid water) is that it overlooks the obvious."

"Wherever we go, we’ll take ourselves with us. Either we’re capable of dealing with the challenges posed by our own intelligence or we’re not. Perhaps the reason we haven’t met any alien beings is that those which survive aren’t the type to go zipping around the galaxy. Maybe they’ve stayed quietly at home, tending their own gardens."

From "Project Exodus/What’s behind the dream of colonizing Mars?" by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker (which I believe is available even to nonsubscribers).

I'm reading that because I read The New Yorker, but by coincidence, I'd just been rereading old Dan Quayle quotes. (Because yesterday, it became necessary to remind you: "What a waste it is to lose one's mind, or not to have a mind is being very wasteful, how true that is.") And I loved this one:

"Mars is essentially in the same orbit . . . Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."

Remember the Mars canals?



Almost as entrancing at The Man in the Moon:



But to get back to the garden — and to The New Yorker — here's a March 2007 piece by Adam Gopnik titled "Voltaire's Garden":

Voltaire goes on to detail the hideous theatrics of the Inquisition: the yellow robes, the burnings and flogging set to Church music, the whole choreography of Christian cruelty. The point of “Candide” is that the rapes and disembowelments, the enslavement and the beatings are not part of some larger plan, not a fact of the fatality of life and the universe, but fiendish tortures thought up by fanatics....

By “garden” Voltaire meant... the better place we build by love. The force of that last great injunction, “We must cultivate our garden,” is that our responsibility is local, and concentrated on immediate action... The horror that Voltaire wanted crushed, cruelty in the name of God and civilization, was a specific and contingent thing... The villains are the villains: Jesuits and Inquisitors and English judges and Muslim clerics and fanatics of all kinds. If they went away, life would be much better. He knew that the flood would get your garden no matter what you did; but you could at least try to keep the priests and the policemen off the grass. It wasn’t enough, but it was something.

"There are three problems with this unbearable metaphor: Barack Obama is not in captivity, he’s not a bear, and he’s not loose."

"As Voltaire said of the Holy Roman Empire, it was 'neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.'"

Maureen Dowd takes on the "bear is loose" idiocy that we were talking about here and here a few days ago.

"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."

A quote by Voltaire, in the second-highest rated comment at a Daily Mail article titled: "Hollywood suicide: He is the Brit who conquered Tinsletown. Now Gary Oldman faces ostracism after a spectacularly obscene and non-PC rant against the movie elite."

"Well, bisexual people are kind of like that dog... They’re misunderstood. They’re ignored. They’re mocked."

"Even within the gay community, I can’t tell you how many people have told me, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t date a bisexual.’ Or, ‘Bisexuals aren’t real.’ There’s this idea, especially among gay men, that guys who say they’re bisexual are lying, on their way to being gay, or just kind of unserious and unfocused."

Said a man who identifies as a bisexual. He also identifies as a lawyer, and he once represented a lady whose gay neighbors were — as the NYT article "The Scientific Quest to Prove Bisexuality Exists" puts it — "trying to have her dog put down." The man, Brad S. Kane, said he took the side of the dog — not the anti-dog gay guys — because the dog was "the underdog." "The dog needed help, needed a voice."

Nothing I've quoted above says "science" to me. I think there's a social quest to affirm the existence of bisexuality. People choose (or happen) to think of themselves that way and feel that it's mean not to accept them at their word. But that can be a prompt for scientific research. Somehow, I don't believe people really want a scientific answer to the question... unless it's the answer they want.

The lack of scientific orientation is apparent in the article title, which, you'll note, is not The Scientific Inquiry Into Whether Bisexuality Exists.

Suddenly, I feel like paraphrasing Voltaire: If bisexuality did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

"Listen, I like stopping by Althouse, but let's get real. Althouse and Meade are living a high-income, privileged life that many of us can only dream about."

Rants Jeffrey in my "time to stop talking about the election and have our lives be about love and beauty" post.

It takes a day like today to put all of that into focus. Cultivate your garden?! I've seen the photos of where she and Meade live. C'mon. Many of us would love to live surrounded by all those expensive toys and have the summer off to order a pile of books for the Kindle and take a few leisurely vacations.

The class (and income) issue rarely comes up here. I think it's about time we hashed this out.

As others have pointed out above, Ann's cavalier, gather-ye-rosebuds response is predicated on being financially stable for the rest of her life. She has the good life NOW and will have it till the day she dies (or almost).

Let me repeat, though. I generally enjoy Ann's blog, but today seems like a good time for people to discuss this issue.

I'd said "cultivate your garden" in a comment in that thread. It's a reference to Voltaire's advice in "Candide" — damn, I typo'd "candidate"! — where it's not just advice for the comfortably affluent. Here, you can put it in your Kindle — in English — for $0.00 — absolutely free. You can read the greatest books ever written and never run out of reading material — all free. 

And I have the summer off because I choose not to teach during the summer. I choose not to make more money. As for Meade's economic choices, you don't know what they are, and I choose not to invade our privacy by explaining the structure of the economic unit that is our household. But we do, in many ways, choose noncommercial activities over moneymaking things, and we take advantage of the wealth that we have built up in our lives by enjoying our home and the natural beauty of our state and our country. We buy a state park sticker for our car every year and county ski and bike trail passes, and we never run out of incredibly cheap things to do.

If Meade and I were starting our lives together and in our 20s — a topic we've discussed many times — we would put a premium on love and beauty and on maximizing our free time... and our freedom generally. But that isn't where we happened to meet. You may be somewhere else, and if you are, use your brain. Figure out what your values really are and what you should be doing with your life. You are not your job. You are not a slave. Think! Pay attention! Do something with what you have. Don't pester your mind with envy. It's perfectly idiotic to wait for the world to change into a form you like.

That's what Voltaire was talking about when he had his long-suffering character Candide say:

"I know... that we must cultivate our garden."

"You are right," said Pangloss, "for when man was first placed in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, that he might cultivate it; which shows that man was not born to be idle."

"Let us work," said Martin, "without disputing; it is the only way to render life tolerable."

The whole little society entered into this laudable design, according to their different abilities. Their little plot of land produced plentiful crops. Cunegonde was, indeed, very ugly, but she became an excellent pastry cook; Paquette worked at embroidery; the old woman looked after the linen. They were all, not excepting Friar Giroflée, of some service or other; for he made a good joiner, and became a very honest man.

Pangloss sometimes said to Candide: "There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunegonde: if you had not been put into the Inquisition: if you had not walked over America: if you had not stabbed the Baron: if you had not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado: you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts."

"All that is very well," answered Candide, "but let us cultivate our garden."

"I have told myself a hundred times that I would be happy if I were as stupid as my neighbor, and yet I would want no part of that kind of happiness."

"But yet, upon reflection, it seems that to prefer reason to happiness is to be quite insane."

The House of Fallen Timbers...

... a small log cabin that David Lottes built from the dead trees that were cluttering up his 4-acree wood.

The blog-saga begins here.

ADDED: 2 good quotes in that blog's sidebar:

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” — John Steinbeck

"The secret of being a bore is to tell everything." - Voltaire

The Steinbeck quote reminds me of this essay by Larry Kaufmann: "The Occupy movement has it all wrong: Income mobility proves that the American dream is still alive." ("No one can change the past, so it's pointless to worry about what others have earned (or saved and turned into wealth) in previous years.")

The Voltaire quote seems like the theory behind Nina Camic's blog. She's in Paris now, after her pilgrimage to Warsaw. ("I’ve stopped speaking Polish for good... I became an immigrant without at least initially intending to be that....")

AND: Thinking of tiny houses and OWS encampments and prompted by Sofa King in the comments — Does he have all the permits for building that? — I went looking for this:

However, if one designs to construct a dwelling-house, it behooves him to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all he find himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clue, a museum, an almshouse, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead. Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary.

"I just updated my will and trust and, with heavy heart, cut out what was a significant bequest to my alma mater, Brooklyn College."

Says Bruce Kesler. The reason: The school chose one book to give to all incoming freshman to read to give a sense of a "common experience," and the book is "How Does It Feel To Be A Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America," written by "a radical pro-Palestinian professor" who happens to teach at Brooklyn College.

[The book contains] interviews with seven Arab-Americans in their 20s about their experiences and difficulties in the US. There’s appreciation of freedoms in the US, and deep resentment at feeling or being discriminated against post-9/11....

The title of the book is drawn from communist WEB DuBois’ same question in 1903 in his treatise The Souls of Black Folk. The current book consciously draws a parallel, ridiculous on its face, between the horrible and pervasive discrimination and injustices that Blacks were subjected to a century ago and Arab-Americans today.

The author asserts “The core issue [of Middle East turbulence] remains the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination,” that the post-1967 history of the entire area is essentially that of “imperialism American-style,” and that the US government “limits the speech of Arab Americans in order to cement United States policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Again, preposterous....

Online I found two professors who protested to the college president. One, retired from Brooklyn College, said: "This is wholly inappropriate.  It smacks of indoctrination. It will intimidate incoming students who have a different point of view (or have formed no point of view), sending the message that only one side will be approved on this College campus. It can certainly intimidate untenured faculty as well."

I can't imagine wanting freshman to get the message that they are about to be indoctrinated. On the up side, for freshman: If the school makes it clear right in the first week, you may still be in a position to quit and get your tuition back. If they're subtle about it — and it's so easy to be subtle about it — you're drawn into it. Clear efforts at indoctrination are repugnant. One recoils. It's like evil-tasting poison. The evil taste is a great benefit. You reflexively spit it out.

So now I'm picturing the Brooklyn College freshman, hurling "How Does It Feel" against the wall. In the movie I'm inventing in my head, the soundtrack is Bob Dylan — how does it feel — as The Freshman stomps out of Brooklyn and into a life without higher education indoctrination...

Teachers teach that knowledge waits...

Ah, but where does The Freshman go?

For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be Do what they do just to be*
Nothing more than something they invest in

We were talking last night: Why are you doing what you are doing? Do you need death staring you in the face to take that question seriously?

Maybe you don't need death staring you in the face to ask whether you have the courage to be true to yourself and not just to do what others expect you to do. And how much courage does it take when those who expect you to do what they want are so crude about it? But if you don't do what they want, what will you do? Where else is there to go?

What would I do if I were there where you are, dear Freshman? Because I'm old, and I've already made a lot of choices, I don't want to tell you what to do.  This post began with the old man's point of view: Bruce Kesler saying he's got lots of money and he's cutting Brooklyn College out of his will to express himself. But what should a young person do? I'm still an old person answering that question, but I was driving through the bohemian section of an American city the other day and thinking... oh, just about what I was thinking in the early 1970s: I want to live the artist's life. That doesn't mean you need to be an artist, but there is an art to living, and you are more a work of art than a thing you invest in. Yet even if the main thing you want — in this awful economy — is to be something you invest in, a radical left-wing indoctrination is a godawful investment decision.

***

And I still haven't said that I got to Kesler via D.G. Meyers via Instapundit. Meyers says:

In my experience, few if any of the Brooklyn Collge freshmen will even bother to open the book. I can remember the title of the book that was assigned to all incoming freshmen at U.C. Santa Cruz the year I went up there (it was Arthur Koestler’s Act of Creation), but that’s the sum of what I remember about the book. I bought a copy, but never heard it discussed anywhere on campus. Same for the various books that were assigned to incoming freshmen at Texas A&M University over the years. After the English department made a fuss over choosing them, they were never mentioned again.

Yes, but it's not that easy: Brooklyn College also assigns its book in a required English course. I remember the book that was assigned for orientation week to freshmen at the Residential College (at the University of Michigan) in 1969: Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle." 40 years later, I can't think of a book I'd rather read. In fact, it happens I was rereading it yesterday.

All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies.

It's nice to be told that right at the outset so you know what you're getting into. Very nice.

***

* I've corrected that line in "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" after cutting and pasting the lyrics from the official Bob Dylan site. I was surprised to see the line "cultivate their flowers to be." It didn't have the right number of syllables, and it didn't lead properly into the next line, and I didn't remember ever hearing it. Meade questioned it too and played the original recording to get to the very familiar line (which also makes a lot more sense). It was weird seeing "cultivate their flowers" — which I took as an allusion to Voltaire's "we must cultivate our garden" — because Meade, with whom I share a love of Dylan, has made a life out of cultivating flowers, and cultivating flowers is something you're more likely to do if you've chosen to defy disrespected authority and see yourself as much more than something you invest in. Not that you can't build up great wealth by starting a gardening business.

Today's drawing: Voltaire, pens.

This is the drawing I wish I'd used yesterday. It's from the same notebook as the Thanksgiving drawing of the wineglass, which was not drawn on Thanksgiving but in Paris a few years ago. The reason I wish I'd used this drawing yesterday is that yesterday was the day my Normblog profile ran, and there was a reference to Voltaire in one of my answers. I don't know when I'm going to have occasion to talk about Voltaire again and rather than try to work Voltaire into some future posting, let me use the Voltaire drawing today. This drawing was done at the Louvre, the bust is the work of Houdon, and the comment in the cartoon bubble was not something I heard but something I read on a card on the wall.



Going through my Paris notebook is always troubling to me because I remember how much I disliked the pens I took to Paris. They were India ink felt tips that just didn't feel right. I had recently taken a trip to Amsterdam and done my best travel notebooks, and I knew part of the reason the Amsterdam notebooks worked out well was the pen: a new gold-nibbed Mont Blanc pen, which I filled with fountain India ink. A fountain pen enthusiast emailed after I posted the law school notes drawing and asked if I still used a fountain pen. This is a bit of a sore subject with me, as I wrote back:

I lost the Pelikan pen that got me through law school, eventually admitted to myself that I wasn't going to find it, replaced it with a Mont Blanc pen, which I used a lot, including for drawings (with fountain India ink), finally admitted that it just didn't work right anymore and I wasn't going to be able to figure out a way to fix it, replaced it with another Pelikan pen, which I promptly lost. So I'm in the phase where I think I've got a shot at finding the lost pen.

The emailer sent me to a very nice website for pen enthusiasts, and I'm thinking maybe I can find some way to revive the Mont Blanc pen, which is the one that helped me so much in Amsterdam and was so sadly missed in Paris. I've never had a pen I liked so much as the Pelikan pen I had in law school. When I finally gave in and replaced the Mont Blanc with a new Pelikan, I really hoped to get back to the feeling of the best pen I ever had, the law school pen. But the truth is the new Pelikan did not feel like the one given to me 25 years earlier. Is it possible I lost it on purpose out of disappointment? Yet I still believe that I would have broken it in and made it feel like the old one. Maybe memories of how things felt 25 years ago cannot be trusted.

But back to Voltaire. Mont Blanc, I see, makes a Voltaire fountain pen. This seems fortuitous. Maybe I should buy one. What is the connection between pens and Voltaire? He was a writer, of course. But also, he used a pen name. It would be quite nice if it were Voltaire who said "The pen is mightier than the sword," but he did not, even though it seems like the sort of thing he might have said. Even that other great free speech quote, is apparently not actually his. But there is a Voltaire pen quote:

To hold a pen is to be at war.