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But it feels like death
Oct. 22nd, 2013 06:31 pm
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 7. High today: 9, at midnight. Looks like we're not going to get below freezing in October; I figured that must be pretty unusual, so I started flipping back through the records--it last happened in 2004, before that in 1998, before that in 1995 ... and before that in 1971.
(Again, I wrote most of this a few weeks ago at the cottage, and some of it today ... the point being that we know what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE... Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there—and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch on to an established facial expression to fit and go with it, which is you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end. Listen! Listen!)
I have the same awful feeling I had at closing time a few years ago: I've just nearly gotten ready, and now it's time to quit. (This will almost certainly be the latest the cottage has ever been closed up. I don’t think my grandfather ever left it later than Thanksgiving. Last year the pump froze on October 13. Tonight will be the first night there’s a risk of that; just in the nick of time I’m able to head back up there to keep the taps dripping through the night, before closing it up on the weekend.) At least I don't have the same despairing thought I had a few years ago, that I'll have to start all over again next year—although most of the main things I had gone into this year wanting to get to, I’ll be going into next year wanting to get to.
You have to feel like things are going to come around again, that you're not just moving from one thing to the next and each thing in succession is gone, gone, gone. Feeling like you're making progress only defers the problem; once you've reached the point you were progressing toward, you're lost--now what?
Well, OK, that's what eternal recurrence is all about, right--einmal ist keinmal, so how do we get some weight into things around here? Eh, but that's not really it. What I hate about things slipping into the past is not that they're gone in the sense of having been obliterated, but that they are gone from me and I from them; I am no longer with them; we are no longer together except through the tenuous strings of memory. Adults used to like to torture me, although I don't think they realized how torturous it was, by telling me to "say goodbye to the cottage" as we were pulling out of the drive for the last time in the fall and I watched it disappear through the back windshield. There is a pain, obviously, in leaving, and that pain has to do with the fact that from now on, for however long or forever, you will be over there and I will be over here. Would I miss you less if you were simply gone? When someone has died, you tell yourself that you have to get over it; you have to get over it because there's nothing else to do--you can't bring them back. When you're not simply gone, but over there while I'm over here, then you don't have to get over it. And so, maybe, you don't. And when you are as gone as you can be--when you are dead and only in my past--that I miss you still shows up the fact that no one and nothing is ever simply gone. There is something that I miss: you, in the past and from out of it, are what I miss. (And don't it always seem to go....) Otherwise, what's to miss?
One of my hobby horses about Nietzsche is that he comes to realize about eternal recurrence that things don't have to come around again to have weight. In fact, moments in the past have a solidity they can't have in the present. (Some people have taken it to be a philosophical problem how statements about the past, or the future, can be true, since there is nothing for them to be true to, since the past no longer is and the future is yet to be. If you get what the early Heidegger got, then you get that the present is not except with its past and its possible futures; if the past is not there, then the present is not here. But what to me is more intuitively true than that is Sartre's idea that the present is nothing and things only have any substance when they have passed into the past. Well, Sartre just thinks that about human beings--I am nothing; I am free to be anything now; in the present I am pure possibility and no actuality; all the facts about me are facts about what I have been and not about what I am (or will be). The same kind of thing seems true to me about events, though for different reasons--actually just for one simple reason. The event happens for a moment, or even a day or a week, but once it has happened it has happened forever; there it always is, always having happened--as Zarathustra says, the stone "it was" that can't be moved.) I think so often of Sam Ajzenstat, in a seminar I took with him at McMaster, carefully unwrapping his sandwich, peering at it as if it were an interesting thing, and eating it. (Just a few days after writing this, I learned from Howard Adelman's blog that Sam Ajzenstat had died the week before. I told you my funny Howard-and-Sam-Mallin story (or two); now I'll tell you my funny Howard-and-Sam-Ajzenstat story: when I arrived at York, I was directed to go see Howard to find out what I was supposed to do as a PhD student in philosophy. I told him that my MA thesis defence had been a disaster, and mentioned that Sam Ajzenstat had been on my committee. (I should say that the disasterousness of my defence was not Sam's fault. In fact, he stayed behind after everyone else had left to give me some advice. The defence was a disaster mostly because it got stuck on one question; somehow no one recognized my attempted answers as answers to the question. Funny thing about that: Sam told me after that I should have just asked for a different question. You can do that???) Hearing this, Howard says he'll call Sam and ask him what happened, and he picks up the phone and starts dialling. No answer, thank God. I had no idea at the time that Howard and Sam were buddies going back to highschool. Another funny thing about that: my meeting with Howard concluded with him telling me that he isn't a Kantian, and he doesn't think it's wrong to use people, so I should feel free to use him. Of course I also had no idea at the time that Howard's defining himsef as a Hegelian and not a Kantian is linked for him with Sam Ajzenstat's Kantianism.) That was just a short stretch of "present", thirty seconds at most, when I was attending to Sam attending to his sandwich--at the time, it was hardly anything--but it stays there in the past and presents itself to me, from out of the past, again and again.
I think also of how I used to see old men examining things in the grocery store, as if they were interesting things, and how I would like to be like that--an old man examining things in a grocery store! (Think about that--why do old men examine things in the grocery store? Probably their wives have died, and now they have to do their own shopping, and they don't know which brand of margarine they should get; they never dreamt there were so many brands of margarine. Well, but, I'm the same way every time I go to buy laundry detergent--how in the world did there get to be so many kinds of laundry detergent? Not only so many brands, but so many varieties of each brand. (When I was a kid, there were three: Tide, Sunlight, and ABC, in descending order of price and presumed quality. One of them was blamed for giving me a rash when I was maybe four or five; I don't remember whether it was Tide or ABC. After that we mostly used Sunlight.) So I have to examine them all, and eventually choose, in fear and trembling.) And then it happened to occur to me how briefly you get to be an old man examining things in the grocery store, or to be an old man doing anything at all. There is always some old man examining things in the grocery store, but not always the same one. I think of what a great time it has been at the cottage the last two Thanksgiving weeks and the weeks seem like whole seasons. I think of the upcoming Thanksgiving week and sometimes I can barely face it because it will be over so quickly.
Annie Dillard, in An American Childhood, tells of how she would sometimes spend weekends at a friend's family's farm in West Virginia, and how when she was unpacking her clothes on Friday night she would be distressed that it was almost Sunday afternoon and time to leave.
Sorrow's child grieves not what has passed
But all the past still yet to come
Eventually she refused to go because she loved it there too much. Oddly I think I have that problem more when I'm at the cottage for more than a few days. I guess maybe when I'm only here for a few days I come already resigned to hardly being able to do anything while I'm here. If I'm here for a week or more, I feel like I can do everything, and then there are just a few days left and I can hardly do anything again ... and in between I'm increasingly anxiously calculating what percentage of the time has passed between arriving and leaving (and trying to reassure myself that I don't have too short a time left--yes, I have only two days left, but remember how much I did in those first two days? It is a fact, too, that my days seem much longer at the cottage than in the city, because I do so much more.) Actually, the longer I'm here, the more I come up with to do--every new thing I do (like climbing up the Beaver Bay hill, or walking all the way down Ridge Road, past the little church and the organic farm with the menacing horses and cows) becomes a thing I could do again, and so it can also become a thing I'm not doing. The more I stay, the more there is to leave.
(Again, I wrote most of this a few weeks ago at the cottage, and some of it today ... the point being that we know what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE... Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there—and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch on to an established facial expression to fit and go with it, which is you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end. Listen! Listen!)
I have the same awful feeling I had at closing time a few years ago: I've just nearly gotten ready, and now it's time to quit. (This will almost certainly be the latest the cottage has ever been closed up. I don’t think my grandfather ever left it later than Thanksgiving. Last year the pump froze on October 13. Tonight will be the first night there’s a risk of that; just in the nick of time I’m able to head back up there to keep the taps dripping through the night, before closing it up on the weekend.) At least I don't have the same despairing thought I had a few years ago, that I'll have to start all over again next year—although most of the main things I had gone into this year wanting to get to, I’ll be going into next year wanting to get to.
You have to feel like things are going to come around again, that you're not just moving from one thing to the next and each thing in succession is gone, gone, gone. Feeling like you're making progress only defers the problem; once you've reached the point you were progressing toward, you're lost--now what?
Well, OK, that's what eternal recurrence is all about, right--einmal ist keinmal, so how do we get some weight into things around here? Eh, but that's not really it. What I hate about things slipping into the past is not that they're gone in the sense of having been obliterated, but that they are gone from me and I from them; I am no longer with them; we are no longer together except through the tenuous strings of memory. Adults used to like to torture me, although I don't think they realized how torturous it was, by telling me to "say goodbye to the cottage" as we were pulling out of the drive for the last time in the fall and I watched it disappear through the back windshield. There is a pain, obviously, in leaving, and that pain has to do with the fact that from now on, for however long or forever, you will be over there and I will be over here. Would I miss you less if you were simply gone? When someone has died, you tell yourself that you have to get over it; you have to get over it because there's nothing else to do--you can't bring them back. When you're not simply gone, but over there while I'm over here, then you don't have to get over it. And so, maybe, you don't. And when you are as gone as you can be--when you are dead and only in my past--that I miss you still shows up the fact that no one and nothing is ever simply gone. There is something that I miss: you, in the past and from out of it, are what I miss. (And don't it always seem to go....) Otherwise, what's to miss?
One of my hobby horses about Nietzsche is that he comes to realize about eternal recurrence that things don't have to come around again to have weight. In fact, moments in the past have a solidity they can't have in the present. (Some people have taken it to be a philosophical problem how statements about the past, or the future, can be true, since there is nothing for them to be true to, since the past no longer is and the future is yet to be. If you get what the early Heidegger got, then you get that the present is not except with its past and its possible futures; if the past is not there, then the present is not here. But what to me is more intuitively true than that is Sartre's idea that the present is nothing and things only have any substance when they have passed into the past. Well, Sartre just thinks that about human beings--I am nothing; I am free to be anything now; in the present I am pure possibility and no actuality; all the facts about me are facts about what I have been and not about what I am (or will be). The same kind of thing seems true to me about events, though for different reasons--actually just for one simple reason. The event happens for a moment, or even a day or a week, but once it has happened it has happened forever; there it always is, always having happened--as Zarathustra says, the stone "it was" that can't be moved.) I think so often of Sam Ajzenstat, in a seminar I took with him at McMaster, carefully unwrapping his sandwich, peering at it as if it were an interesting thing, and eating it. (Just a few days after writing this, I learned from Howard Adelman's blog that Sam Ajzenstat had died the week before. I told you my funny Howard-and-Sam-Mallin story (or two); now I'll tell you my funny Howard-and-Sam-Ajzenstat story: when I arrived at York, I was directed to go see Howard to find out what I was supposed to do as a PhD student in philosophy. I told him that my MA thesis defence had been a disaster, and mentioned that Sam Ajzenstat had been on my committee. (I should say that the disasterousness of my defence was not Sam's fault. In fact, he stayed behind after everyone else had left to give me some advice. The defence was a disaster mostly because it got stuck on one question; somehow no one recognized my attempted answers as answers to the question. Funny thing about that: Sam told me after that I should have just asked for a different question. You can do that???) Hearing this, Howard says he'll call Sam and ask him what happened, and he picks up the phone and starts dialling. No answer, thank God. I had no idea at the time that Howard and Sam were buddies going back to highschool. Another funny thing about that: my meeting with Howard concluded with him telling me that he isn't a Kantian, and he doesn't think it's wrong to use people, so I should feel free to use him. Of course I also had no idea at the time that Howard's defining himsef as a Hegelian and not a Kantian is linked for him with Sam Ajzenstat's Kantianism.) That was just a short stretch of "present", thirty seconds at most, when I was attending to Sam attending to his sandwich--at the time, it was hardly anything--but it stays there in the past and presents itself to me, from out of the past, again and again.
I think also of how I used to see old men examining things in the grocery store, as if they were interesting things, and how I would like to be like that--an old man examining things in a grocery store! (Think about that--why do old men examine things in the grocery store? Probably their wives have died, and now they have to do their own shopping, and they don't know which brand of margarine they should get; they never dreamt there were so many brands of margarine. Well, but, I'm the same way every time I go to buy laundry detergent--how in the world did there get to be so many kinds of laundry detergent? Not only so many brands, but so many varieties of each brand. (When I was a kid, there were three: Tide, Sunlight, and ABC, in descending order of price and presumed quality. One of them was blamed for giving me a rash when I was maybe four or five; I don't remember whether it was Tide or ABC. After that we mostly used Sunlight.) So I have to examine them all, and eventually choose, in fear and trembling.) And then it happened to occur to me how briefly you get to be an old man examining things in the grocery store, or to be an old man doing anything at all. There is always some old man examining things in the grocery store, but not always the same one. I think of what a great time it has been at the cottage the last two Thanksgiving weeks and the weeks seem like whole seasons. I think of the upcoming Thanksgiving week and sometimes I can barely face it because it will be over so quickly.
Annie Dillard, in An American Childhood, tells of how she would sometimes spend weekends at a friend's family's farm in West Virginia, and how when she was unpacking her clothes on Friday night she would be distressed that it was almost Sunday afternoon and time to leave.
Sorrow's child grieves not what has passed
But all the past still yet to come
Eventually she refused to go because she loved it there too much. Oddly I think I have that problem more when I'm at the cottage for more than a few days. I guess maybe when I'm only here for a few days I come already resigned to hardly being able to do anything while I'm here. If I'm here for a week or more, I feel like I can do everything, and then there are just a few days left and I can hardly do anything again ... and in between I'm increasingly anxiously calculating what percentage of the time has passed between arriving and leaving (and trying to reassure myself that I don't have too short a time left--yes, I have only two days left, but remember how much I did in those first two days? It is a fact, too, that my days seem much longer at the cottage than in the city, because I do so much more.) Actually, the longer I'm here, the more I come up with to do--every new thing I do (like climbing up the Beaver Bay hill, or walking all the way down Ridge Road, past the little church and the organic farm with the menacing horses and cows) becomes a thing I could do again, and so it can also become a thing I'm not doing. The more I stay, the more there is to leave.
