Kyle's Files: 3 Paragraphs That Have Stuck With Me For A Decade (Plus Other Good Stuff)

Only Birth Conquers Death, Knowing Thyself, A History of Uncertainty

Alpine Ibex (reddit)

This edition really is mostly my “files.” In sections 3, 4, and 5 I included paragraphs that have been working on me a decade or more. I didn’t want to risk making them smaller with the impact they have on me know, so I mostly shut up this week.

If you have a passage, paragraph, page, book, or idea that’s stuck with you for a really long time, I’d love to hear about it. Reply to this email or post it in this letter’s Chat to share it.

1. Tweets’n’Things™

“The whole glory of virtue is in activity; activity, however, may often be interrupted, and many opportunities for returning to study are opened. Besides, the working of the mind, which is never at rest, can keep us busy in the pursuit of knowledge even without conscious effort on our part.” Cicero

“You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well. And I mean that last "well" in both senses. You have to be good at reading, and read good things.” Paul Graham, on his blog

“In a world and business that is awash with data, it is tempting to use data to answer all of our questions, including creative questions. I urge all of you not to do that.” Bob Iger (Quoted here)

Haggard Hawks 🦅 @HaggardHawks

In medieval timekeeping, a MOMENT was precisely 1/40th of an hour—or exactly 90 seconds.

"‘Look at 'em," Augustus said. ‘You'd think they just discovered teeth.’" - Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

It is better for us to accept that we’re social creatures, open and vulnerable to suggestion, and to make a conscious choice about our models of desire. Luke Burgis, The Orthodoxy of Heterodoxy

"Revolution doesn't have to do with smashing something; it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out." - Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss

Brad Stulberg @BStulberg

Myth: some people are motivated and other people are not. Truth: motivation depends every bit as much on the situation and activity as it does on the person. Example: I am very motivated (well, motivated enough) to write and lift weights, but not at all motivated to do math.

“If the ancient ideal was the make of oneself a target, to say in effect: ‘Here I am, come and get me,’ the Stoic ideal was to declare, ‘I am not what you see; you can’t get me because I’m not here at all.’” Roman Honor

“Social media forms are performative solo forms with an odd conflation of friendship and marketing; the body is alone in a room performing the self, with an undercurrent of desire for applause. Without a town square to gather in and hash out the day with neighbors, social media communications have a shading of loneliness underneath.”– Annie-B Parson, The Choreography of Everyday Life

2. Only Birth Can Conquer Death

The first paragraph comes from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

The hero is the man of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that it is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved. As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of the laws of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be—if we are to experience long survival—a continuous "recurrence of birth" (palingenesia) to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death. For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified-and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn.

3. Another Way To Know Thyself

The next paragraph that has been stuck in my mind for a decade comes from a footnote in Carlin A. Barton’s Roman Honor: Fire In The Bones, a history of the emotional and spiritual life of the ancient Romans (a focus I would love to find in more history books):

The Pythian Apollo’s dictate “Know thyself!” is interpreted by Cicero as an admonition to learn the strength of one’s body and spirit (nostri vim corporis animique) and to follow the way of life that enabled one to make fullest use of that force. One learned through the contest the strengths of one’s body and spirit. “No man,” Seneca declares, “is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself”

This external form of self-knowledge compliments another form of self-knowing that I’ve come to appreciate. I first found it in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil:

A thing that is explained ceases to concern us—What did the God mean who gave the advice, ""Know thyself!" Did it perhaps imply "Cease to be concerned about thyself! become objective!"—And Socrates?—And the "scientific man"?

I then later rediscovered it in a more practical form in Zen Buddhism. Here is Dogen:

To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to become one with the ten thousand things.

4. The Birth of Uncertainty

The final paragraph that has been living in my mind for over a decade is from Richard Tarnas’ Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View:

“[T]he more the Greek developed a sense of individual critical judgment and emerged from the collective primordial vision of earlier generations, the more conjectural became his understanding, the more narrow the compass of infallible knowledge. “As for certain truth,” Xenophanes asserted, “no man has known it, nor will he know it.” Philosophical contributions such as the irresolvable logical paradoxes of Zeno of Elea, or Heraclitus’s doctrine of the world as constant flux, often seemed only to exacerbate the new uncertainties. With the advent of reason, everything seemed open to doubt, and each succeeding philosopher offered solutions differing from his predecessor’s. If the world was governed exclusively by mechanical natural forces, then there remained no evident basis upon which firm moral judgments could be founded. And if the true reality was entirely divorced from common experience, then the very foundations of human knowledge were called into question. It seemed that the more man became freely and consciously self-determining, the less sure was his footing.”

Later, Tarnas describes how Christianity helped to ease some of the pain that came with all this new uncertainty:

In contrast to the previous centuries of metaphysical perplexity, Christianity offered a fully worked out solution to the human dilemma. The potentially distressing ambiguities and confusions of a private philosophical search without religious guideposts were now replaced by an absolutely certain cosmology and an institutionally ritualized system of salvation accessible to all.

More details on what that looked like:

Only by such [divine] intervention were [Paul and Augustine] saved from continuing a life the self-defined direction of which could now be seen as futile and destructive. In light of these experiences, all merely human activity, whether independent willfulness or intellectual curiosity, now appeared secondary – superfluous, misleading, even sinful—except as it might lead to fully God-directed activity. God was the exclusive source of all good and of man’s salvation. All heroism, so central to the Greek character, was now concentrated in the figure of Christ. The human surrender to the divine was the only existential priority. All else was vanity. Martyrdom, the ultimate surrender of the self to God, represented the highest Christian ideal. As Christ was self-giving in the highest degree, so should all Christians strive to be like their Redeemer. Humility, not pride, was the distinguishing Christian virtue, requisite for salvation.

Remembering the first paragraph we looked at, we might see how much easier that “self-achieved submission” became.

5. Miscellany

Fat Albert, Alaska’s 1,000+ pound polar bear. (reddit)

Steven Spielberg’s new movie, The Fabelmans (trailer), is really good. I found it interesting to learn that he’s been trying to approach the subject of divorce for a long time (TikTok).

“They think that the ground state is a resting state, a state of inaction, and so whenever they're acting, this is a deviation from the default, and it requires effort to maintain. I say, the ground state is in motion. The privileged state is not a frozen state.” (Essay)

Bill Burr almost called Kanye. (YouTube)

“Sperm counts worldwide plunged by sixty-two percent in under fifty years between 1973 and 2018, and this could lead to a reproductive crisis.” (Article)

My Spotify wrapped reminded me how good a movie Tick Tick Boom! (trailer) was. Apparently I am in the top 0.05% of Bon Iver enjoyers. The song that’s been in my top 100 playlist for the most years running now is Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. (Spotify | YouTube)

My brother-in-law called Cocaine Bear this generation’s Snakes On A Plane and that feels correct. (Trailer)

I appreciated this bit from Huberman Lab: “Most of us are taught to believe that eye contact is critical to a feeling of mutual attention and connection in conversation. However, studies that address the underlying physiology of attention indicate that it is the making and breaking of eye contact that ultimately determines connection in conversation and the sense of being heard and understood.” (Instagram Video)