Author Archives: Phil

In one of Updike’s novels a minister finishes the last page of The Collected Works of Robert Ingersoll and, in less than the time it takes to complete this sentence, loses his faith. This is absurd, of course—a person who quits believing in God that fast never believed to begin with—but the scene gives some idea of the renown and infamy that once attached to the name of the nineteenth-century orator/lawyer/agnostic Robert Ingersoll. This was a man so famous a Texas town named itself after him, and so hated that the same town renamed itself after one particularly fervid revival.

The son of a liberal, abolitionist Presbyterian minister—by all accounts the sort of godly Midwestern left-wing radical that you now only hear about in Marilynne Robinson’s books—Ingersoll was first embittered against Christianity by witnessing the way his father was treated by one backward-ass congregation after another. (I believe I’ve met a few pastor’s kids with similar tales to tell.) He served in the Civil War and was active in Republican politics, back when Republicans were awesome. They tried to recruit him to run for governor of Illinois once, on condition that he keep his infidelity a secret. Ingersoll refused—because he thought keeping secrets from the public was immoral.

Consider that gesture, and you comprehend the difference between a period that “sponsored a very generous imagination of the contents of other peoples’ souls,” in Marilynne Robinson’s phrase, and the cynicism of a period when people babble for and against God but seem agreed on the minor-ness of the human subject. Or maybe you don’t; Robinson’s is a large claim, and the nineteenth century had its problems too. Still, it’s difficult to imagine anyone declining to run for office today on the basis of something half so noble. Even Barack Obama, whom I persist in thinking the best of a bad lot, has evinced his comfort with enlarged governmental, and decreased personal, secrecy.

Ingersoll looks so much better than today’s major public spokespeople for nonbelief (or belief) that it’s depressing. Literate Christians are irked by Sam Harris; they were threatened by Ingersoll. His arguments are a mixed bag, but he can really write. He’ll often start by going after the veracity of the Hebrew Bible. Which, well, fine. Nobody still believes those troop counts anyway. His attacks on the four gospels are more serious. I’ve wondered about that Lukan census for a while now myself, and Christianity is, unlike some religions, a pointless exercise if its historical basis is completely removed. He’ll then go on to the inductive argument from evil against God’s existence, which is strong and emotionally persuasive if not really decisive.

What always makes him angriest is the doctrine of the eternal suffering of unbelievers. It’s not a point against Ingersoll that many of today’s pious would agree with him about this last item. (Indeed, he noticed the beginning of the change himself, in “Why I Am Agnostic”: “Nothing gives me greater joy than to know that this belief in eternal pain is growing weaker every day—that thousands of ministers are ashamed of it.”)

Ingersoll’s main fault, and it’s a decisive one, is that he’s a tone-deaf, context-oblivious reader of the Bible, which leads him to claim that it says a lot of things it arguably doesn’t. He has this fault, at least, in common with his modern imitators. You can title your book Letter a Christian Nation, but if that same book shows complete ignorance of your supposed audience, and if your response to that criticism shows your contempt for the very idea of finding out what they actually think, well … New Atheism’s appeal is to those who already don’t believe, and more importantly, who don’t get. It seeks to move people from the category of “I don’t understand this Gawd stuff” to “I actively oppose this Gawd stuff.” This is not in itself a bad thing. Atheistic humanism is not dumb—it has seemingly insoluble problems, but so does everything (in my religion, we think that a Jewish teenager became pregnant with God)—and people who believe in it should not be bullied, or barred from public life. And there’s a kind of condescension toward nonbelievers—frequently shown by people whose own lives don’t exhibit serious practice of any religion—that needs to stop, for religion’s sake as well as decency’s. It would be a great day for the churches, for example, if New Atheism could get rich fat reactionaries to stop babbling about “the social utility of religion.” Karl Rove, get your greasy fingers off my metaphysics.

What irritates me in the New Atheists is simply that they misrepresent religions of all kinds and, when called on it, archly forbid curiosity about those same religions. Think of the now-ubiquitous “tooth fairy” gambit:

Atheist: I can’t believe in a religion that says sex is bad/infidels must be killed/almost everybody goes to hell/etc.
Liberal Episcopalian: Um, me neither. [Gives long explanation of the history and varieties of Christian teaching on sex/relations with outsiders/the fate of nonbelievers.] Clearly, you have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about, so please desist from criticizing metaphysical traditions you don’t understand.
Atheist: I don’t understand much about the TOOTH FAIRY either! [High-fives himself.]

This seems, based on the frequency of its use, to be an effective conversation-stopper. (Conversation-stopping is of course its only purpose.) And yet there’s a screamingly obvious response. If belief in the tooth fairy had inspired the Sistine Chapel, the Mass in B Minor, and (at least as far as the West is concerned) the idea that poor people matter, you bet your ass I’d want to know something about it. Whether “religion” is bad or good, everyone agrees it’s had a massive impact on human culture. That’s why you either inform yourself about it or (as most of us must do) regret your ignorance and avoid sweeping claims.

Another reason to like Robert Ingersoll, besides the intellectual integrity with which he stands against certain things, is what he stands for. Here is his response to the nullification of the first (1866) Civil Rights Act (you know, the one that’s been erased from history):

This decision takes from seven millions of people the shield of the Constitution. It leaves the best of the colored race at the mercy of the meanest of the white. It feeds fat the ancient grudge that vicious ignorance bears toward race and color. It will be approved and quoted by hundreds of thousands of unjust men. The masked wretches who, in the darkness of night, drag the poor negro from his cabin, and lacerate with whip and thong his quivering flesh, will, with bloody hands, applaud the Supreme Court.

My first thought: Why the hell did they stop teaching oratory in the schools?

We can have an argument about whether, in principle, moral values can rest on anything other than a metaphysical basis, one reachable only via some leap of faith or other. I don’t see how they can. But this does not mean, and shouldn’t be taken to mean, that only the religious can be good. Ingersoll’s record, as exemplified in this passage, proves otherwise. Those who fly the non-believer’s flag would be better off following him than they would an arrogant, Amish-baiting biologist, or a neuroscientist-cum-torture advocate.

How embarrassing, to only now find myself liking Christopher Hitchens. In my defense I plead youth. By the time I was old enough to know who the guy was, he’d gotten, like so many nineteenth-century explorers, lost in the Bush. You’ve got to remember that the famous Hitchens prose style and dry wit weren’t often on display in the early 2000s, a time when he apparently considered it within his dignity to call an antiwar country singer a “fucking fat slag.” Unrelenting hate made him sound more like the caterwauling, spittle-flecked Thomas More of the dialogues against Tyndale than like the Thomas More who wrote Utopia, or—to use a closer-to-hand example—like the William F. Buckley who threatened to “sock [Noam Chomsky] in your goddamn face” and not like the witty funny Buckley that everybody claims to have read all those years. Humane More was of course a real person; Witty Urbane Buckley, in this reader’s experience, was no realer than the Iraqi nuclear bomb, and I was long willing enough to assume the same about Good Hitchens. Between his ugliness toward those who were not violently wrong about Iraq and his apparently mounting enthusiasm for anti-theist arguments that I learned to refute in sophomore intro philosophy, I foresaw little joy for me in reading his books. Bush was the worst President I hope ever to see (and no, dammit, I will not “let it go”), while New Atheism is the classic example of an Internet-era intellectual movement: it has no useful purpose or practical expression beyond making comment trolls feel brave.

So I just wasn’t prepared for how overwhelmingly good Hitch’s 1988 collection Prepared for the Worst is. In this book, Hitchens wields the deft pen that his eluogists spoke of in January, and which was rarely in evidence in all those smug, sexist, reputedly sloshed Slate columns. That’s enough to win my sympathy right there. Even better, he wields it against bullies. This book contains “The Chorus and Cassandra,” in which 1985 Hitchens debunks exactly the kinds of cheap lies that 2001 Hitchens would peddle against the pint-sized linguist-dissident, and does so with exactly the kind of wit and verve that Chomsky seems to avoid on some sort of weird scruple. In another essay, “Holy Land Heretic” (a long profile of Israel Shahak), he gives the succinctest description of what’s wrong with Commentary Magazine that I can imagine:

[T]his was … the standard neoconservative three-card monte as it is played in America: America is a democracy which allows demonstrations against its policies; the Soviet Union does not allow such demonstrations; the American demonstrations are therefore a form of aid and comfort to the Soviet Union. Sometimes the first or second card of this trick is ineptly played, resulting in the unintentionally absurd injunction “This is a democracy, so shut up!” or the even flatter injunction that the critical voice should relocate to Moscow. 

I get that a lot. One morning in second grade, the twins next door took a dislike to me (as second-graders will do) and spent the entire period of our walk to school yelling “Philip hates his mom and dad!” The key here is that I didn’t laugh. I worried that someone—God forbid, even mom or dad—would here and believe this vicious rumor. In a high whine I defended myself for two miles. My day was ruined. I don’t doubt that Norman Podhoretz, sometime in 10,000BCE or whenever that fucker was a child, witnessed a similar schoolyard contretemps and noted the technique’s effectiveness. Something about the unjustness of having our love for elders and benefactors called into question is just so galling that we can’t laugh it off; the very craziness of the accusation makes it more rather than less hurtful. Many have pointed out the way that this kind of insult works to suppress criticism of US and Israeli policies (Chomsky and Shahak are often called “self-hating Jews” by armchair psychologists), but no one has ever done so as quickly and thoroughly as Hitch does in this passage. I’d have wasted a lot fewer hours trying to come up with a devastating retort to such childish digs if I’d read this essay back when I was a baby left-leaner.

He’s a Quixote and an aphorist. He’s also a professional: he’s mastered one of the hardest arts every book reviewer must learn, that of entertaining running paraphrase. (This is so hard to do that most book reviewers, including me, simply start talking about the book and then subtly change the subject.) Hitch never shirks his dues to summary, but he makes the summarizing fun. In the course of reviewing Conor Cruise O’Brien’s The Siege, for example, he quotes a passage in which O’Brien speaks slightingly of “the unrelenting international efforts to bring about the withdrawal of Israel from the West Bank” and then follows up with: “The what international efforts? The unremitting what efforts? The unremitting international what?”, thus doing more both to represent and refute O’Brien’s argument in three sentences than most could do in three pages.

This book justifies Hitchens’s reputation again and again. I hope that the discovery of God’s love for him will be a harrowing but not annihilating experience; I’m starting to dig this guy.

One of the things I learned from this weird, interesting book is just how long some people (who weren’t William Blake) continued to resist Newtonian physics: given that DeMorgan wrote in the 1860s, up to forty years before Einstein overturned the whole thing. I tried to read up a bit more about anti-Newtonianism, having learned that it was a thing. This article lays out a few of those alternative cosmologies. Fun stuff.

Apparently I need to party with the scientists more often. From Volume II of A Budget of Paradoxes:

THE ASTRONOMER’S DRINKING SONG.

No knowledge of nature without experiment and observation: so said Aristotle, so said Bacon, so acted Copernicus, Tycho Brahé, Gilbert, Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, etc., before Bacon wrote. No derived knowledge until experiment and observation are concluded: so said Bacon, and no one else. We do not mean to say that he laid down his principle in these words, or that he carried it to the utmost extreme: we mean that Bacon’s ruling idea was the collection of enormous masses of facts, and then digested processes of arrangement and elimination, so artistically contrived, that a man of common intelligence, without any unusual sagacity, should be able to announce the truth sought for. Let Bacon speak for himself, in his editor’s English:

“But the course I propose for the discovery of sciences is such as leaves but little to the acuteness and strength of wits, but places all wits and understandings nearly on a level. For, as in the drawing of a straight line or a perfect circle, much depends on the steadiness and practice of the hand, if it be done by aim of hand only, but if with the aid of rule or compass little or nothing, so it is exactly with my plan…. For my way of discovering sciences goes far to level men’s wits, and leaves but little to individual excellence; because it performs everything by the surest rules and demonstrations.”

To show that we do not strain Bacon’s meaning, we add what is said by Hooke, whom we have already mentioned as his professed disciple, and, we believe, his only disciple of the day of Newton. We must, however, remind the reader that Hooke was very little of a mathematician, and spoke of algebra from his own idea of what others had told him:

“The intellect is not to be suffered to act without its helps, but is continually to be assisted by some method or engine, which shall be as a guide to regulate its actions, so as that it shall not be able to act amiss. Of this engine, no man except the incomparable Verulam hath had any thoughts and he indeed hath promoted it to a very good pitch; but there is yet somewhat more to be added, which he seemed to want time to complete. By this, as by that art of algebra in geometry, ’twill be very easy to proceed in any natural inquiry, regularly and certainly…. For as ’tis very hard for the most acute wit to find out any difficult problem in geometry without the help of algebra … and altogether as easy for the meanest capacity acting by that method to complete and perfect it, so will it be in the inquiry after natural knowledge.”

Bacon did not live to mature the whole of this plan. Are we really to believe that if he had completed the Instauratio we who write this—and who feel ourselves growing bigger as we write it—should have been on a level with Newton in physical discovery? Bacon asks this belief of us, and does not get it. But it may be said, Your business is with what he did leave, and with its consequences. Be it so. Mr. Ellis says: “That his method is impracticable cannot, I think, be denied, if we reflect not only that it never has produced any result, but also that the process by which scientific truths have been established cannot be so presented as even to appear to be in accordance with it.” That this is very true is well known to all who have studied the history of discovery: those who deny it are bound to establish either that some great discovery has been made by Bacon’s method—we mean by the part peculiar to Bacon—or, better still, to show that some new discovery can be made, by actually making it. No general talk about induction: no reliance upon the mere fact that certain experiments or observations have been made; let us see where Bacon’s induction has been actually used or can be used. Mere induction, enumeratio simplex, is spoken of by himself with contempt, as utterly incompetent. For Bacon knew well that a thousand instances may be contradicted by the thousand and first: so that no enumeration of instances, however large, is “sure demonstration,” so long any are left.

The immortal Harvey, who was inventing—we use the word in its old sense—the circulation of the blood, while Bacon was in the full flow of thought upon his system, may be trusted to say whether, when the system appeared, he found any likeness in it to his own processes, or what would have been any help to him, if he had waited for the Novum Organum. He said of Bacon, “He writes philosophy like a Lord Chancellor.” This has been generally supposed to be only a sneer at the sutor ultra crepidam; but we cannot help suspecting that there was more intended by it. To us, Bacon is eminently the philosopher of error prevented, not of progress facilitated. When we throw off the idea of being led right, and betake ourselves to that of being kept from going wrong, we read his writings with a sense of their usefulness, his genius, and their probable effect upon purely experimental science, which we can be conscious of upon no other supposition. It amuses us to have to add that the part of Aristotle’s logic of which he saw the value was the book on refutation of fallacies. Now is this not the notion of things to which the bias of a practised lawyer might lead him? In the case which is before the Court, generally speaking, truth lurks somewhere about the facts, and the elimination of all error will show it in the residuum. The two senses of the word law come in so as to look almost like a play upon words. The judge can apply the law so soon as the facts are settled: the physical philosopher has to deduce the law from the facts. Wait, says the judge, until the facts are determined: did the prisoner take the goods with felonious intent? did the defendant give what amounts to a warranty? or the like. Wait, says Bacon, until all the facts, or all the obtainable facts, are brought in: apply my rules of separation to the facts, and the result shall come out as easily as by ruler and compasses. We think it possible that Harvey might allude to the legal character of Bacon’s notions: we can hardly conceive so acute a man, after seeing what manner of writer Bacon was, meaning only that he was a lawyer and had better stick to his business. We do ourselves believe that Bacon’s philosophy more resembles the action of mind of a common-law judge—not a Chancellor—than that of the physical inquirers who have been supposed to follow in his steps. It seems to us that Bacon’s argument is, there can be nothing of law but what must be either perceptible, or mechanically deducible, when all the results of law, as exhibited in phenomena, are before us. Now the truth is, that the physical philosopher has frequently to conceive law which never was in his previous thought—to educe the unknown, not to choose among the known. Physical discovery would be very easy work if the inquirer could lay down his this, his that, and his t’other, and say, “Now, one of these it must be; let us proceed to try which.” Often has he done this, and failed; often has the truth turned out to be neither this, that, nor t’other. Bacon seems to us to think that the philosopher is a judge who has to choose, upon ascertained facts, which of known statutes is to rule the decision: he appears to us more like a person who is to write the statute-book, with no guide except the cases and decisions presented in all their confusion and all their conflict.

… If Newton had taken Bacon for his master, not he, but somebody else, would have been Newton

If you hang around libraries enough, some books start to seem unavoidable. For example, just past the Harvard and Britannica sets of classics that (inevitably, appropriately) start off the “A” section of many academic libraries, you find a large, unpromising shelf of moldering Edwardian-era essay collections by dudes with three, sometimes four names, and always, always there is a two-volume, gilt-spined thing called A Budget of Paradoxes, which only inspection of the title page confirms is by Augustus DeMorgan. Whoever he was.

Well, actually he was a terribly important mathematician. He discovered the logical law bearing his name, rigorized the concept of mathematical induction, and helped discover relation algebra, which is totally a thing that I know what it is. He even got a crater of the moon named after him.

Essentially, if there isn’t yet a series of steampunk-influenced mystery novels in which this man solves crimes with George Boole, then somebody isn’t doing his job.

In any case, A Budget of Paradoxes turns out to be probably the only DeMorgan book I will ever be smart enough to read. It’s based on a series of articles he wrote for the Athenaeum, which was like the Atlantic Monthly for monocled Brits, and it is DeMorgan’s account, based only on the books in his (very considerable) library, of “paradoxers” in science and math. By “paradoxer” he doesn’t mean “user of the rhetorical technique in which an apparently logically impossible statement is made”—otherwise there’d be nothing remarkable about this book except how dumb it was to call anything A Budget of Paradoxes that isn’t a Chesterton biography. DeMorgan means, instead, what we mean by “the heterodox”: people who stand apart from common opinion on some subject. He collects examples both of thoughtful and disciplined dissenters from consensus and of nutcases who wouldn’t pass sixth-grade science. Naturally, the latter take up the bulk of the book.

So, basically, it’s a small encyclopedia of cranks, written in a time when being a crank meant something, Goddamnit. I don’t mean to come on like a Luddite, but cheap bandwidth, not to mention grainy classifieds in the back pages of Harpers, have drained much of the romance from crankery. Even the perpetual-energy folks can have their own very nice website (or two) which surely attracts zillions of unique visitors (it’s one of the first ten when you Google “perpetual motion”). (If you click that link, please read the guy’s poem.  Just, please. Don’t you love literature?) As for the Flat Earthers, they Tweet. The climate is such that a popular film can hang a major plot point on our willingness to believe that time machinists do a vigorous business over the Internet, catering to ex-football players in the red states. This is totally not the crank life that we were all promised by “The X-Files.” 

Where have they taken our dank, smelly basements?!

Consider for a moment the Best Western continental breakfasts over which our country’s conferencegoing alien abductees swap tales of butthurt. And then contrast it with DeMorgan’s description (as dryly funny as the rest of the book) of meeting the indefatigable nuts who populate A Budget of Paradoxes:

Before proceeding to open the Budget, I say something on my personal knowledge of the class of discoverers who square the circle, upset Newton, etc. I suspect I know more of the English class than any man in Britain. I never kept any reckoning; but I know that one year with another—and less of late years than in earlier time—I have talked to more than five in each year, giving more than a hundred and fifty specimens. Of this I am sure, that it is my own fault if they have not been a thousand. Nobody knows how they swarm, except those to whom they naturally resort. They are in all ranks and occupations, of all ages and characters. They are very earnest people, and their purpose is bona fide the dissemination of their paradoxes. A great many—the mass, indeed—are illiterate, and a great many waste their means, and are in or approaching penury. But I must say that never, in any one instance, has the quadrature of the circle, or the like, been made a pretext for begging; even to be asked to purchase a book is of the very rarest occurrence—it has happened, and that is all.

The circle-squarers of Victorian England couldn’t take to WordPress. No, they wore out shoe leather all over London looking for converts, and they obviously didn’t do it for the money. They entirely lacked the modern crank’s flair for self-promotion, or his (usually his) capacity for adopting dumb opinions because a major corporation pays them to. Their craziness was disinterested, manly, and philanthropic, pursued in unforgiving conditions, at great personal sacrifice.

It took energy and love to square circles in the Steam Age. And it took considerable energy, as well, to acquire a decent education in pseudoscience in those pre-vodka-and-Learning Channel days. DeMorgan frankly confesses that the pursuit of pseudodoxia has worn him out:

I do not mean, by my confession of the manner in which I have sinned against the twenty-four hours, to hold myself out as accessible to personal explanation of new plans. Quite the contrary: I consider myself as having made my report, and being discharged from further attendance on the subject. I will not, from henceforward, talk to any squarer of the circle, trisector of the angle, duplicator of the cube, constructor of perpetual motion, subverter of gravitation, stagnator of the earth, builder of the universe, etc. 

He tells some great stories. This is my favorite: An elderly man came to me to show me how the universe was created. There was one molecule, which by vibration became—Heaven knows how!—the Sun. Further vibration produced Mercury, and so on. I suspect the nebular hypothesis had got into the poor man’s head by reading, in some singular mixture with what it found there. Some modifications of vibration gave heat, electricity, etc. I listened until my informant ceased to vibrate—which is always the shortest way—and then said, “Our knowledge of elastic fluids is imperfect.” “Sir!” said he, “I see you perceive the truth of what I have said, and I will reward your attention by telling you what I seldom disclose, never, except to those who can receive my theory—the little molecule whose vibrations have given rise to our solar system is the Logos of St. John’s Gospel!” He went away to Dr. Lardner, who would not go into the solar system at all—the first molecule settled the question. So hard upon poor discoverers are men of science who are not antiquaries in their subject! On leaving, he said, “Sir, Mr. De Morgan received me in a very different way! he heard me attentively, and I left him perfectly satisfied of the truth of my system.” I have had much reason to think that many discoverers, of all classes, believe they have convinced every one who is not peremptory to the verge of incivility.

That last comment (“… believe they have convinced everyone who is not peremptory to the verge of incivility”) brings me back to conversations with an unstoppable (aren’t they all?) libertarian friend, many years ago, who mistook “That’s neat, guy” for agreement. Some aspects of crankery haven’t changed since DeMorgan. Perhaps they never will.

In the meantime, this book is an obscure delight (and it’s even in print!), just the sort of thing I hoped I’d find by reading my way straight through the library like a crazy person. God bless the cranks for making life interesting, and God bless DeMorgan, whose patience, not unmixed with condescension (and curiosity), has given us this lavish Budget.

When I was 17 my high school gave me the English Award and my first-ever case of imposter’s syndrome. From the podium, as she announced my name, my forensics coach, Leslie Thomas, without whose willingness to ride Saturday buses to speech tournaments at better-endowed schools I might not have survived adolescence in one piece, told the assembled dignitaries of Honors Night that I “had read every book in the classroom library.” This was simply not true, and I said as much to everyone in earshot. It was not even within the bounds of acceptable hyperbole. Ms. Thomas’s classroom library was enormous, and I had read little more than the spines. My awareness of literature, at that age, rested almost entirely on a stack of old Spin magazines and on a rumor known as J.D. Salinger.

In 1996, in fact, I was deeply ignorant, and I still am. I tell my students (following an old argument of Neil Postman’s) that stupidity inheres in particular acts, not in some overall state of a person’s being, and I deeply believe this, but I also believe that no human being can ever know enough, that the circumference of your ignorance expands right along with the circle of your knowledge. Some people seem more ignorant than they are. A great many people, and this continually breaks my heart, seem stupider than they are even to themselves. I have the opposite problem, at least among the people whose opinions most matter to me (what the lout at the bar, who discounts book-larnin’, may think is not my concern). The first girl I ever made out with told me I was the best-read person she knew. I said I wasn’t as well-read as she thought I was. She was a heady mixture of Tori Amos and Ayn Rand, a funny romantic who dabbled in humorless, High Serious philosophical egoism, and she shushed me: “If you ever say that to me again, I’ll stop speaking to you forever.” Well.

People think I’m being self-deprecating when I talk like this. (Or, more mistakenly, that I’m being humble. Count the number of Is in this posting. I wish to God I were humble—literally, daily—but that’s not my problem.) I often am self-deprecating, because otherwise I’d have to pass up a lot of good jokes that I don’t want to make at anyone’s expense but my own, but on this subject I’m not. I read a lot; it’s a passion, and an addiction, and (now) an occupational necessity. But to my best friends—who will be 98% of the readers of this blog—I must say, as I’ve said so many times in the past fifteen years: I’m not as well-read as you think I am. If you have a decent memory, and a habit of reading essays, you can sound erudite in no time at all. One book review by Guy Davenport will give you enough Wittgenstein anecdotes to suggest a college education. It’s an optical illusion, nothing more.

But I would like to be as well-read as my best friends seem to think I am. Indeed, I am continually mounting ambitious schemes that involve redoing my education from scractch, really buckling down and getting Aristotle this time. When I describe these projects to others, they make another mistake about me—they decide I’m orderly. In reality order and method attract me for the same reason breasts do: because I haven’t got any.

My current ambitious self-education scheme, which I haven’t even talked about with my wife for fear she’ll commit me, is that I’ve decided to read, in order, every book in the UNC library that looks good. I am well aware that this is a stupidly unattainable goal, but my temperament balks at any but stupidly unattainable goals. And the feeling that I have always had in libraries—the sense of plenitude, tempered with anxiety at the number of books I would love that I’ll never get to—goads me on.

For the sake of the program—ooh, I just love order and method!—I am exempting myself from things like dictionaries, magazines, and Great Books sets, because there’s a difference between “stupidly unattainable” and just stupid. And also to avoid redundancy. I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at the A section of an academic library—most people don’t—but it starts off with the Harvard Classics and the Britannica Great Books, which, right there, is enough reading for a lifetime, if you do it right. And every single one of those necessary books are to be found again in the B, P, and Q sections (theology/philosophy, literature, and math). So why attempt the impossible twice? And to preserve some variety, I plan to eat my way through the sandwich from both ends at once—when I get sick of A, I’ll read a little from Z, etc.

As for time limits, well, I’ll continue until I stop. Maybe I’ll be interrupted by death. Maybe the robots will take over, or the populist right, having turned its rhetorical campaign against knowing things into a legislative one, will raze the U’s libraries. Or maybe my wife and I will have a kid, or I’ll just get sick of being weighted down by some silly project, as I tend to do with all my silly projects. But till then, A and Z await. Maybe, along the way, I’ll finally finish all the books in Ms. Thomas’s library.

A student at MURAP this summer shared this video with me; it said everything I was trying to say about writing procrastination, but funnier. Another thing I plan to share with consultees/clients/coached people/writers (still looking for the right word).