Author: John

Real Freedom According to David Foster Wallace

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

From his commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College in 2005.

The whole speech is well worth your time.

Cold Clarity

Night Sky



If, mid-winter, you crave the comfort of warmer temperatures, then you’re going to have to settle for cloud-befuddled skies, fog patches, and mists rising from every snowy field.

With coldness comes clarity. Stars gleam brightest when temperatures are plunging. Then the air stings like iron and brings a flush to your cheeks. It stiffens your fingers and makes you pause mid-stride, testing your gloves and taking stock of your endurance.

How long can you withstand the chill?

Cold teaches you something about time.

You might grimace and stamp your feet—but oh that light! Those distances!

Everything is defined.

(Photo by kronerda Creative Commons, Some Rights Reserved.)

The Wisdom of Angélique Kidjo

From a profile of Angélique Kidjo in the New York Times:

Her approach to songwriting also follows African tradition: She sings as the conscience of a community. She still abides, she says, by advice that her family gave her. One of the first songs she wrote, as a teenager, was an angry denunciation of apartheid in South Africa; her father insisted that she rewrite it without the hate and anger, telling her: “An artist’s role is not to ignite violence. You ignite peace.”

Choosing to Look

The workman fixing the window plays his radio all day, and except for late afternoons when I hear country songs, Rush Limbaugh and his colleagues fill our yard with bitter ranting.

There are news organizations and politicians that would have us spend our days rehearsing anger.

Better, I think, to spend our days appreciating what we have. If I give more thought to John Boehner than my daughter today, I’m a fool. Let’s stay informed, but perhaps we should treat the news like a Northern lake on a winter day: a brief immersion suffices to remind of us of vast inhospitable depths.

Look at all that’s around us that might otherwise go overlooked.

Walking the dog today, I saw sumac leaves as red as coxcombs, bittersweet berries like golden beads draped on trees. By the spruce trees, a turkey vulture circled low, just above the treetops, sharing its shadow.

On days when there’s barely a breeze, you’ll still see children running through yards, determined to get their kites aloft. Their young spirits appreciate even the faintest brush of air.

As a Zen teacher would say: Just this. Just this.

Information Does Not Want to Be Free

Information does not want anything.

It’s not conscious. It has no agency.

Asserting that “Information wants to be free” in any discussion about law, publishing, or economics makes about as much sense as saying “televisions want to be left on” and “books want to have green covers.”

Somewhere on a shelf of a used bookstore in New York City is the last printed version of a mediocre novel from thirty years ago. Tomorrow it’s going to be sold and pulped. The information in that book will disappear not because it did not sufficiently yearn to be free; it’s going to disappear because no one wanted to read it.

I realize that the people who make this remark about freedom (presumably) understand in some sense that information itself has no volition.

But their assignation of agency to information clouds any discussion of what’s really going on. They pretend there’s a natural force at work. There isn’t. Nothing going on here is as inevitable as gravity. These freedom-speakers are not uncovering a cultural secret or a scientific law like those discovered by Kepler. Instead they’re obfuscating an important discussion with a slogan that probably sounds really cool at the happy hour of a tech conference.

To state the obvious: People make choices about how to share information, what to buy, what to borrow, and what to steal. Technology (which is created by people) and custom (which develops through the actions of many people) over time can greatly influence how people act. Technology, culture, and economics—all fashioned by people, moment by moment—affect the flow of information.

If we’re going to have any kind of a meaningful discussion about access to information, economic remuneration, artistic freedom, or that (to some, dread) word, “copyright,” then let’s at least focus on what is necessary, what is provisional, what choices are being made, who’s making them, and what they have to gain by making them.

One of the more interesting stories unfolding in the arts world now is the way that a few technology companies have gained the rights to distribute music online and offer musicians practically chicken scratch in return. This might be capitalism. It might be a kind of theft or at least dealing in poor faith. Calling if “freedom” and pretending that it’s simply a matter of natural law running its course strikes me as exceedingly poor taste. (It’s akin to a cigar-chomping plutocrat opining that wages for hourly employees never want to rise.) (This article in The Guardian offers a balanced variety of views on this topic.)

How to distribute data and how or even whether creative people should be paid for their work are important questions. Let’s discuss them seriously.

A Brief Adventure with a Curious Dog

A cloudy morning. The pickers had gone. I took the dog for a walk. We were heading toward the back of the property, when suddenly Sadie began sniffing at the base of a row of fir and spruce. A friend of mine and I had cleared under these trees in the spring, and the ground there seemed empty now except for some tendrils of bittersweet attempting to snake up into the branches. Half an hour earlier, when I had been picking blueberries on the other side of these trees, I had had this corner of the field to myself. As then, all seemed quiet and calm.

Sadie pushed further under the boughs. I heard “chook, chook, chook”—then all was raucous commotion as a flock of turkeys lifted into the air, just beyond Sadie’s startled face. Brown wings beating and beaks a-jabber, they exploded in a panic, criss-crossing in flight, and scattered into the high boughs of pines and firs and birch along the back of the field.

I laughed out loud at the sudden transformation of the air. It was as though Sadie’s curiosity had conjured the birds from the ground. Now the birds hung in the trees, waiting silently like rabbits that had done their duty and been produced out of a hat.

What would the day produce next from this ordinary, silent, spring-loaded stage?

Truth in a Berlin Salon c. 1910

In a culture dedicated to pleasure, power, and stratagems, truth becomes simply another card in the deck.

No one speaks the truth here, in these circles that set the tone for society at large. —Perhaps a word of truth is out of the question, if only because people here are too clever and are acquainted with thousands of truths and untruths. The knowledge of human nature is too rich, the treasury of experiences in fact already too replete. In a sense, speaking the truth presupposes a certain narrow-mindedness.

So comments Robert Walser in “Frau Bähni,” a short recollection written in 1916 that appears in Berlin Stories (NYRB).

This little book presents Walser’s impressions—sometimes comic, sometimes somber—of Berlin in the first decades of the 20th century. The quality of the pieces is uneven, but the best pieces are superb, and I recommend the collection overall.

Of course, there are other cultures where a preference for truth seems almost quaint. . . .