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From the Commonplace Book

On The Education of Henry Adams:

[Adams’] method, in general, is to leap nervously into the midst of a science of which he has no particular knowledge and worry a few details with a kind of irritated persistence…. His procedure is to be witty rather than intelligent, and, having established a state of confusion for the sake of the wit, to deduce his spiritual suffering from it…. The result is a certain iridescence of emotional surface but precisely nothing of sanity. The bewilderment is imposed on the experience, arbitrarily and at every point. What we get is not a philosophical experience, but an emotional experience: a vision of chaos which is cosmological, chronological, and theological. He draws from this experience the only moral possible to a man in such a condition, the moral that truth is indecipherable…. Adams is not content, even provisionally, to study his world as it is, in the hope of arriving at a working knowledge of it; there is no knowledge, for Adams, unless it is a part of a complete system, deriving from an acceptable definition of the Absolute….This neurotic and childish impatience, amounting almost to indolence, is the final fruit of the Christian doctrine in New England; the patience and humility of an Aristotle or a Newton are incomprehensible….

I should therefore like to add my belief that a balance which is artificial, or which is, in my terms, a habit formed by willed perseverance deriving from rational understanding of the need for it, and which preserves one from madness, is in its own nature a good; for madness is in its own nature and quite obviously an evil. A morality which preserves one from this loss of balance is defensible beyond argument by virtue simply of the fact that it so preserves one; and a morality such as that of Adams is evil, simply by virtue of the fact that it aims at loss of balance. One does not need Divine Revelation to know this; a single look at a psychopathic ward is sufficient. And once one has admitted the initial advantage of being sane, one will be forced to admit the additional advantages of being as sane, or as intelligent as possible; and a good deal of careful scrutiny may enable us to refine a very little upon the rough scheme of our initial morality….

[For Adams, by contrast,] [n]othing was comprehensible; each event and fact was unique and impenetrable; the universe was a chaos of meaningless and unrelated data, equivalent to each other in value because there was no way of evaluating anything. Comprehension, judgment, and choice being nullified, there was no reason for action, physical or spiritual, and life was mere stagnation.

—Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason 374-430 (3d ed.  1947)

Making Shakespeare intelligible

John McWhorter on the (alleged) incomprehensibility of Shakespeare. I don't pretend to understand all the language when I see it performed, either. But I find that I'm content at such moments to allow the mere sound of the words carry me away. It's okay not to understand all of it. Also, I would not recommend, as McWhorter does, reading the play before seeing it; I would recommend reading about the play before seeing it. Particularly, look it up in Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare beforehand.

Isn't Sullivan Ballou's letter a little too good to be true?

I for one doubt its authenticity. No original has been found, and the story of its being located in Ballou's trunk after his death and all that, sounds too much like high Victorian sentimentalism to me. It's a beautiful and eloquent letter, but I remain skeptical of this convenient and touching story.

What Jefferson actually thought

In his speech today urging Americans to increase the size of government control still further, President Obama quoted Thomas Jefferson: “We have engaged in fierce and passionate debates about the issues of the day, but from slavery to war, from civil liberties to questions of economic justice, we have tried to live by the words that Jefferson once wrote: ‘Every man cannot have his way in all things…Without this mutual disposition, we are disjointed individuals, but not a society.’”

One might mention that with regard to slavery, that it was only when we refused to compromise that slavery came to an end, but aside from that, here’s something else Thomas Jefferson said:

We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.

Thomas Jefferson knew better than most people when it was okay to compromise and when it was unacceptable to compromise. He’s just not on your side, Mr. President.

Shakespeare The Thinker

I’ve been guided through the course of my recent Shakespeare obsession by some really outstanding books, including the invaluable Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, Peter Ackroyd’s very interesting biography, and Bill Bryson’s brief but enjoyable book. But none of these books (except Asimov) is as good as A.D. Nuttall’s Shakespeare The Thinker. In brief and clear language, Nuttall takes the reader on a tour of almost all of the plays, examining the fascinating philosophical issues that Shakespeare often raises, defending some intriguingly clever interpretations, and—most refreshingly—deflating some of the sillier modern “deconstructions.” Nuttall’s writing is intelligent and extremely well-researched, and yet it never swamps the reader or leaves him feeling like the idiot in the back of the classroom. What’s more, his take on the plays is often very convincing. I found it particularly interesting how often Nuttall came back to a theme I’ve found cropping up time and again in Shakespeare—the distinction between the world of reality and the world of words that we use to describe, or in corrupt cases, try to use as a substitute for, the real world. This really comes to the fore in his examination of Coriolanus, who seems to be a creature of his social upbringing—and yet isn’t; as Nuttall shows, he comes at the end of the play to reveal an inner self that is independent of, and able to stand to some degree outside of, his social context. Such a reading flies in the face of the Historicist or post-modernist readings that have been so popular of late, but Nuttall defends the points quite well.

There are plenty of other books out there that give an overview of Shakespeare’s plays and investigate their deeper meanings. But I have often found them unpersuasive or lacking in unity. Harold Bloom, for example, reaches conclusions that seem more designed to impress than to convince, by denigrating as much as by over-exaggerating his greatness. (Here might be a good point to mention again the great Joseph Epstein essay on Bloom). And although Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All is a very helpful reference with its explanations of historical context and possible biographical clues, she seems to lack any single thematic interpretation, often backing away in one paragraph from a claim made in the previous one. Nuttall, by contrast, offers us a thorough, readable, thoughtful, whole Shakespeare, in a very enjoyable book for the layman who wants to get in deep with the plays. I say get them all—but where you should use these others as references to look up the play you’re going to see that night, you should read Nuttall’s book all the way through.

On the Chris Reed show at 7:30

I will be joining Chris Reed on Top Story, on San Diego's KOGO AM 600 tonight at 7:30 to talk about the California Supreme Court's decision in the California Grocers case. You can listen online here.

My interview on This Week In Law

Denise Howell invited me to appear on the latest episode of This Week In Law. You can watch it here, and get more information here. The books I mention in the show are David Shipler's The Rights of The People and Tom G. Palmer's Realizing Freedom.

Casta Diva

Good for Officer Lyons!

This is great. An honorable, professional, and responsible police officer.

Quite a contrast to some others.

The Lew Rockwell crowd's view of July 4

Jefferson's Declaration of Independence was "[the most] misleading political assessment uttered by any leader in the history of the United States. No words having such great impact historically in this nation were less true."

Not terribly surprising, since the Lew Rockwell pseudo-libertarians idolize a man who, while defending slavery as a positive good, declared that there was "not a word of truth" in the Declaration.