"What if the dilettante’s perpetual movement from one thing to another is not a failure of nerve but a different and defensible way of being..."

"... one whose exploratory zeal turns out to be just what a hyper-specialised, over-optimised and all-too-serious world needs most? Then the dilettante would turn out to be not a capricious buffoon but a kind of modern anti-hero. That, I argue, is a dilettantism worth defending...."

Writes Nigel Warburton, in "In praise of the dilettante/A wayfaring cosmopolitan who never gets stuck, the dilettante is the right anti-hero for our hyper-specialised age" (Aeon).

I was moved to make a tag for "dilettante"! It seemed absurd, at first, but once I saw the old posts to which I could add it, I liked it:

1. "But 'dilettante' is one of those words which deter people from taking up new pursuits as adults."

2. "And so if what you're trying to do is micromanage and solve everything then you end up being a dilettante but you have to have enough knowledge to make good judgments about the choices that are presented to you." 

3. "One moment they are a king, the next a murderer, a jaded dilettante, a passionate and forsaken lover...." 

4. "It must gall Biden to know that his predecessor... actually installed his dilettante daughter and-son-in-law at the highest level of policymaking...."

5. "[S]he is a millionaire dilettante, despite the fact she drives a Prius and lives in a modest Madison home...."

6."The mountains are the artifice of a clever scene painter... it is as if the whole region were an album, the mountains drawn on a blank page by an adroit dilettante for the lady who owns the album...."

7. "It is precisely at times of chaos that morally informed but tough-minded triage decisions must be made, otherwise morality is simply a dilettante’s luxury and a mere intellectual puzzle for the philosophy classroom, but irrelevant on the street."

8. "He's no dilettante. He's the real deal when it comes to being a celebrity judge... He's an ardent and opinionated fan of the show.''

Matt Bai knows he "should care more about Hunter Biden," but he just doesn't.

And he's telling you why in The Washington Post:

... I find it hard to get too worked up over all this, the way I did over the egregious conflicts of Donald Trump’s family during the last administration.

At least he's noticing it and admitting it publicly and feels the need to explain it (or sees some advantage in purporting to need to explain it). Whether the reasons given are sincere, we can judge for ourselves: 

Perhaps it’s because, at bottom, the whole affair seems like less of a public scandal than a family tragedy — the sad story of a lost son careening recklessly through public life, and of the anguished father who couldn’t bear to stand in his way.... 

It is serious business when a president’s family member enriches himself through relationships with foreign actors....

[But politicians' kids are] often haunted by crippling insecurity... [W]hen every door magically opens for you, it’s never really possible to know which ones you might have been able to open all by yourself. They’re befriended by people with agendas, adored and ridiculed by people they’ll never meet. It is not a normal life.... 

It must gall Biden to know that his predecessor, who never served a day in public service before becoming president, not only shrugged while his already-rich children enriched themselves further, but actually installed his dilettante daughter and-son-in-law at the highest level of policymaking.... That’s real corruption.... Biden didn’t let his son anywhere near the center of power and decision-making....

"She was always half-broke. When you date women, she joked, there’s no man to grab the check...."

"If you are made nostalgic by the mention of defunct Manhattan bars and restaurants, this book will be like reading the liner notes to a Billie Holiday or Frank Sinatra album at midnight through a glass of bourbon....  'Sex, to me, should be a religion,' Highsmith wrote. 'I have no other.... As long as beautiful women exist, who can be really depressed?'... She was a powerful and systematic drinker... 'The world and its martinis are mine!... I wonder if any moment surpasses that of the second martini at lunch, when the waiters are attentive, when all life, the future, the world seems good and gilded (it matters not at all whom one is with, male or female, yes or no)'.... Writers drink because 'they must change their identities a million times in their writing... This is tiring, but drinking does it automatically for them. One moment they are a king, the next a murderer, a jaded dilettante, a passionate and forsaken lover; other people actually prefer to stay the same person, stay on the same plane, all the time.... Without liquor I would have married a dull clod, Roger, and had what is called a normal life.'... She kept snails as pets, and would smuggle them through customs in her bra."

Writes Dwight Garner in "Patricia Highsmith Lived Extravagantly, and Took Copious Notes" (NYT). The book he's reviewing is "Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995."

"But 'dilettante' is one of those words which deter people from taking up new pursuits as adults."

"Many of us are wary of being dismissed as dabblers, people who have a little too much leisure, who are a little too cute and privileged in our pastimes.... We might remember... that the word 'dilettante' comes from the Italian for 'to delight.' In the eighteenth century, a group of aristocratic Englishmen popularized the term, founding the Society of the Dilettanti to undertake tours of the Continent, promote the art of knowledgeable conversation, collect art, and subsidize archeological expeditions. Frederick II of Prussia dissed the dilettanti as 'lovers of the arts and sciences' who 'understand them only superficially but who however are ranked in superior class to those who are totally ignorant.'... The term turned more pejorative in modern times, with the rise of professions and of licensed expertise. But if you think of dilettantism as an endorsement of learning for learning’s sake... [m]aybe it could be an antidote to the self-reported perfectionism that has grown steadily more prevalent.... '[I]ncreasingly, young people hold irrational ideals for themselves, ideals that manifest in unrealistic expectations for academic and professional achievement, how they should look, and what they should own'.... Fluid intelligence, which encompasses the capacity to suss out novel challenges and think on one’s feet, favors the young. But crystallized intelligence—the ability to draw on one’s accumulated store of knowledge, expertise, and Fingerspitzengefühl—is often enriched by advancing age."

From "Is It Really Too Late to Learn New Skills?/You missed your chance to be a prodigy, but there’s still growth left for grownups" by Margaret Talbot (The New Yorker).

When's the last time you learned a new skill? If you had to identify 5 new skills to learn — which is something some older person in that article did — what 5 would you give yourself? The guy referred to in the article took on chess, singing, surfing, drawing, and juggling. I wish I could think of just one thing — one or 2. You know, tomorrow is my birthday, and it's one of the Big 0 birthdays. I'd like to think about something to do about it. The skill, perhaps, of stopping time. Apparently it's fine not to be good at it at all — a pure dilettante. But you can only slow the perception of the passage of time, and the relevant skill is boring yourself. What an awful skill! 

"Do I again go in search of lost time with Marcel Proust, or am I to attempt yet another rereading of Alice Walker’s stirring denunciation of all males, black and white?"

"My former students, many of them now stars of the School of Resentment, proclaim that they teach social selflessness, which begins in learning how to read selflessly. The author has no self, the literary character has no self, and the reader has no self. Shall we gather at the river with these generous ghosts, free of the guilt of past self-assertions, and be baptized in the waters of Lethe? What shall we do to be saved? The study of literature, however it is conducted, will not save any individual, any more than it will improve any society. Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves."

Wrote Harold Bloom, in "The Western Canon."

That jumped out at me this morning, because I've been thinking about the idea of forgetting oneself.

Last night, I was reading the story, "Kleist in Thun" (from this collection by Robert Walser), and I was struck by this passage:

The whole countryside down to the water is sheer garden, it seems to seethe and sag in the bluish air with bridges full of flowers and terraces full of fragrance. Birds sing so faintly under all the sun, all the light. They are blissful, and full of sleep. His elbow on the windowsill, Kleist props his head on his hand, stares and stares and wants to forget himself. The image of his distant northern home enters his mind, his mother’s face he can see clearly, old voices, damn it all—he has leapt up and run out into the garden. There he gets into a skiff and rows out over the clear morning lake. The kiss of the sun is indivisible, unabating. Not a breath. Hardly a stir. The mountains are the artifice of a clever scene painter, or look like it; it is as if the whole region were an album, the mountains drawn on a blank page by an adroit dilettante for the lady who owns the album, as a souvenir, with a line of verse.

I'm reading Robert Walser because I was massively impressed by "What the Eye Can’t See," the third act of "Small Things Considered," last Sunday's episode of "This American Life." Excerpt:

[In one of his novels, Walser] wrote, "In one thing, we pupils are all similar. We are small, small all the way down the scale to utter worthlessness. One thing I do know for certain-- in later life, I shall be a charming, utterly spherical zero."...

He'd poke fun at himself for being small, but there was always an edge to it. Worse than being weak, were the people deluded enough to think they're great. It's so pompous. He wasn't mean, exactly, more just entertained by their foolishness. I started to see the world that way, too. But then one day... I saw... Walser had spent the last third of his life in a mental hospital...

I was out walking when I heard the Bloom paragraph and remembered the Walser, so I had a lot of thoughts about what people mean when they speak of forgetting oneself. It can be positive or negative. I thought of the Joni Mitchell song:

I am on a lonely road and I am traveling
Traveling, traveling, traveling
Looking for something, what can it be?
Oh, I hate you some, I hate you some, I love you some
Oh, I love you when I forget about me

Is she oppressed or ecstatic?

So... the topic is: forgetting oneself.

Should Wisconsin Democrats go left to challenge Scott Walker?

Here's Paul Fanlund in the Capital Times fretting that Scott Walker-haters will be too mean to Mary Burke, the wealthy moderate who might run as a Democrat in next year's gubernatorial election.

With Walker gallivanting around the country, playing to tea party rallies and fancying himself as presidential timber, everything about the modest Burke suggests a polar opposite to our egomaniacal governor.

Stories speculating on her running hinted at GOP lines of attack: she is a millionaire dilettante, despite the fact she drives a Prius and lives in a modest Madison home. In truth, she is widely lauded for backing up her charitable contributions with hands-on interactions....

[She has] a Georgetown degree in finance and a Harvard MBA; Walker, of course, never finished college.

... [S]wing voters in Wisconsin are bone-weary after three years of unremitting political combat and, while they are turned off by Walker, are likely unimpressed by over-the-top outrage against him.

That sounds sensible to me, a Wisconsin swing voter, but if Democrats believe Walker is almost surely going to win, they might prefer a firebrand who can cause him some pain. That's exactly what didn't happen in the 2012 recall election, when the candidate was the dull Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett, who'd already lost to Walker in the 2010 election.

All the passion of the 2011 protests petered out to an anticlimax. Who wants that again? People like Fanlund who want a shot at winning.

My advice for them is: Forefront how Burke is not like Barrett. If Burke is another Barrett and Democrats feel they're going to lose anyway, they'll cry for a fiery lefty. Why not?

Triage.

Rabbi Marc Gellman:

What looks like unfeeling cruelty on the TV screen is most likely the result of hard but decent choices made by people who see exactly what we see, but who, unlike us, are charged with facing the chaos and turning it into hope....

Triage is not a way to decide whom to kill. Triage is a way to decide whom to save so that in the end the most people can be saved. Triage choices are tough, but they are necessary because doing nothing is a choice, and because following the loudest scream is a choice, and because only helping those on television is a choice, but all those choices are driven by impulse and are not supported by coherent moral values. If the resources were unnecessarily limited, and if the triage decisions were made in error we will know in time. The point now is that any finger-pointing must be mollified by a good dose of trust, humility and patience. Just because we see a helicopter on the news flying over a group of victims here does not mean that the helicopter is not following a triage decision to save a group of more needy victims there. Triage is where morality meets reality. It is precisely at times of chaos that morally informed but tough-minded triage decisions must be made, otherwise morality is simply a dilettante’s luxury and a mere intellectual puzzle for the philosophy classroom, but irrelevant on the street.

Comments?