This afternoon I finally did a little reading, in Robert C Solomon’s book The Passions. He’s a good writer and he often quotes Nietzsche or Camus, plus a lot of literary figures. In passing, he used a quote from Oscar Wilde, something like, “Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.” But just the activity of reading was good for me. It settled my mind and calmed and soothed me for the rest of the day. I left off on page 67, at the threshold of Chapter 3.
I’m not certain why my day started out so lousy. I believe it was chemistry: too much caffeine plus ibuprofen. The weather was partly cloudy with a temperate climate, though I stayed home the whole day. At times I can feel how my body is aging and changing, and I know there’s nothing I can do about it. The unraveling of genetics is indisputable: it’s like fate in very old Greek tragedies. The Greeks held fate in a sort of awe and reverence, unless the awe is mine when I read Aeschylus or whatever.
The other late night, I looked up a fairytale by the Brothers Grimm which turned out to be “The Peasant in Heaven.” The punchline is that rich people are admitted into heaven once every hundred years but for peasants it’s an everyday occurrence. I wanted to use it in a WordPress post, but it’s been done already. I hate the attitudes of people toward money currently. It’s because they have bad examples to follow. On the other hand, no matter what people were doing, I’d probably take a reactionary stance to pull away from extremes. A lot of thinkers have been reactions to their world. Rousseau guided people one way to an extreme of sentiment and ultimately violence and revolution, while Edmund Burke saw the dangers of ideas after the French Revolution and pushed for stability and conservatism. The example I like is of Jane Austen, who stuck by her opinions and stayed independent of the Romantic movement with Byron as its figurehead. She also tended to marry opposites to resolve extremes, like with sense and sensibility, etc. She was neither romantic nor rationalist but a little of both, to show the fallacy of the dichotomy.
Why does public opinion seem to veer to one extreme or another? Maybe people are bored with things being moderate and medium?
Stewart Copeland wrote a song with these lines:
I wish I never woke up this morning
Life was easy when it was boring