Books I Read – David Press

On Tranquility of Mind by Seneca

Really, my deep dive into the practice of Stoicism came in the virtue of self-control because, well, I did not feel in control of myself when I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, ADD, anxiety, and depression. But really it came down to tranquility of mind. That’s what I was looking for because I’ve never had it, mostly because I didn’t understand how I was wired. So, really, Seneca’s letter on tranquility of mind is the whole reason I practice Stoicism—to treat my ADD. Here is what I take from it:

One. On the cult of productivity, and really—don’t be afraid to take a nap.

“Uninterrupted productivity will soon exhaust it, so constant effort will sap our mental vigor, while a short period of rest and relaxation will restore our powers. Unremitting effort leads to a kind of mental dullness and lethargy. Nor would men’s wishes move so much in this direction if sport and play did not involve a sort of natural pleasure; though repeated indulgence in these will destroy all the gravity and force of our mind. Sleep too is is essential as a restorative, but if you prolong it constantly day and night it will be death.”

Two. There’s a critical section where Seneca described—what read to me as ADHD. He talks about people who live with inertia and are dissatisfied with themselves. “This arises from mental instability and from fearful and unfulfilled desires when men do not dare or do not achieve all they long for, and all they grasp at is hope: they are always unbalanced or fickle, an inevitable consequence of living in suspense.” It makes me certain that this is my struggle.

Three. He then goes on to describe SPIN and SLIDE, what happens to folks with ADD who struggle to regulate the co-morbidities of anxiety and depression. We slide into shame, pessimism, isolation, and no productive or creative outlet.

“these afflictions of failure have caused people to retreat into laziness and private studies which are not suitable to a mind aspiring to public service, keen on activity, and restless by nature because of course it is short of inner resources. This leads to isolation and then boredom and self-dissatisfaction.”

Four. Then he lays out the basics of the Stoic idea of productivity: “We must take a careful look first at ourselves, then at the activities which we shall be attempting, and then at those for whose sake and with whom we are attempting them (82).”

“We must appraise the actual things we attempting and match our strength to what we are going to undertake. For the performer must always be stronger than his task: loads that are too heavy for the bearer are bound to overwhelm him. Moreover, certain tasks are not so much great as prolific in producing many other tasks: we must avoid those which give birth in turn to new and manifold activities, and not approach something from which we cannot easily withdraw. You must set your hands to tasks which you can finish or at least hope to finish, and avoid those which get bigger as you proceed and do not cease where you had intended.”

Five.In which Seneca describes the Stoic Test strategy, negative visualization, justice, and a good lesson in weekend personal activities.

“Think your way through difficulties: hardship conditions can be softened, restricted ones can be widened, and heavy ones can weigh less on those who know how to bear them. Abandoning those things which are impossible or difficult to attain, let us pause what is readily available and entices our hopes, yet recognize that all are equally trivial, outwardly varied in appearance but uniformly futile within. Let us not look envy those who stand higher than we do: what look like towering heights are precipices. On the other hand, those whom an unfair fate has put in a critical condition will be safer lowering their pride in things that are in themselves proud and reducing their fortune as far as they can to a humble level. By justice, gentleness, kindness, and lavish generosity let them prepare many defenses against later disasters to give them hop of hanging on more safely.” (91)

Finally, set advancements at some limit and not allow fortune to decide when they should cease but ourselves to stop far short of that.

Six. One of the last talks I used to give at Paul Smith’s College was on being grateful, dying, and how we’re all just basically compost. It went something like this: that really all the proof that we ever existed is what we create—the children we have, the parents we have, and maybe the work we produce. For even ten minutes a day, that writing, a piece of paper that comes from a tree is one of the most natural things we can do on Earth. When we die, we return to Earth, and writing—whether it’s in published book form or just writing a journal for 10 minutes a day- is a part of the planet’s natural order. It seems like Seneca would agree:

“Should Nature demand back what she previously entrusted to us we shall say to her too: ‘Take back my spirit in better shape than when you gave it. I do not quibble or hang back: I am willing for you to have straightaway what you gave me before I was conscious—take it.’ What is the harm in return to the point whence you came? He will live badly who does not know how to die well. So we must first strip off the value we set on this thing and reckon the breath of life as something cheap.”

Seven. 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman links to this: “The next thing to ensure is that we do not waste our energies pointlessly or in pointless activities: that is, not to long either for what we cannot achieve, or for what, once gained, only makes us realize too late and after much exertion the futility of our desires. In other words, let our labor not be in vain and without result, nor the result unworthy of our labor; for usually bitterness follows if either we do not succeed or we are ashamed of succeeding.”

Burkeman again, and also precisely what I’ve been doing the last four years, so quit it! “They wander around aimlessly looking for employment, and they do not what they intended but what they happen to run across. Their roaming is idle and pointless, like ants crawling over bushes, which purposelessly make their way right up to the topmost branch and then all the way down again. Many people live a life like these creatures, and you could not unjustly call it busy idleness…so let all your activity be directed to some object, let it have some end in view. It is not industry that makes men restless, but false impressions of things drive them made.”

So have experiences and not things.

Consolation to Helvia by Seneca

I loved this one, because Seneca is writing to his mother and comforting her to know that her son has been sent into exile. This one meant a lot to me because for a long time, I’ve considered my time in Indiana to be a kind of exile from my home which is New York. But then this past Winter Solstice, I discarded that sense of exile and said that which made New York home is here now. That sense of New York is always within me, and I really understood this in the last six months or so, while I read this essay.

It links with my root phrase that I repeat to myself every morning to sort of activate my Stoic practice. “There’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad gear, and bad attitudes.” This phrase or aphorism is a popular phrase from where I’m from in New York and it’s an exemplar of the Stoicism’s cardinal virtue of self-control, which is exemplified by Epictetus’s dichotomy of control: “there’s some things in my control, and some things not in my control.”

Seneca illustrates this in the letter:

“Whatever is best for a human being lies outside human control: it can be neither given nor taken away. The world you see, nature’s greatest and most glorious creation, and the human mind which gazes and wonders at it, and is the most splendid part of it, these are our own everlasting possessions and will remain with us as long as we ourselves remain…there can be no place of exile within the world since nothing within the world is alien to men.”

There was a major turning point as well when I was getting my COVID booster shot at a Wal-Mart. When I was in line, there was a guy right next to me, with a Glock on his hip. I didn’t know whether he was a cop or not, but he was wearing a bright orange hoody and ripped jeans and work boots so something tells me he was a construction worker. I read this section:

“I know that this is not something which in our power and that no strong feeling is under our control, lesser of all that which arises from sorrow; for it is violent and violently resists every remedy.”

But really, at the end of all things here it is important to recognize that nature and my ability to make a reasoned choice is something that is never gone, illustrated beautifully in the final paragraph of this letter to his mother. And goes back to linking to Burkeman on Cosmic Insignificance Theory.

“…since my mind, without any preoccupation, is free for its own tasks, now delighting more trivial studies, now in its eagerness for the truth rising up to ponder its own nature and that of the universe. It seeks to know first about lands and their location, then the nature of the encompassing sea and its tidal ebb and flow. Then it studies all the awesome expanse which lies between heaven and earth—this nearer space turbulent with thunder, lightning, gales of wind, and falling rain, snow and hail. Finally, having scoured the lower areas it bursts through to the heights and enjoys the noblest sight of divine things and, mindful of its own immortality, it ranges over all that has been and will be throughout all ages.”

I know that when I close my eyes, and think about nature, I see the Adirondack Mountain Range and the aphorism pops into my head and i know that can never be taken away from me, because it lives in me.

On the Shortness of Life by Seneca

I’ve been reflecting a lot the last month on this year. And this book keeps coming back up. It’s a collected edition featuring this letter and Consolation to Helvia (Seneca’s mother)and On Tranquility of Mind. I think about this quite a lot in the context of 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman because this essay is a significant source.

Here are the four things I learned from it

One. Don’t treat your life like a job. This echoes Stephen King, “Art is for life, not the other way around.” Really understand that comparison is also the thief of joy, and understand that on the grand cosmic theme of life there are tiny bits of your time that are your own.

people want to know how short their lives are, let them reflect how small a portion is their own.” Like compassion is the thief of joy.

Two. Seneca also seems to condone a deep life, not on trivialities like money and position because those are out of control which is the starting point for Stoicism.

“So many of the finest men have put aside all their encumbrances, renouncing riches and business and pleasure and made it their one aim up too the end of their lives to know how to live.” (10)
“Mark off, I tell you, and review the days of your life: you will see that very few—the useless remnants—have been left to you. One man who has achieved he badge of office he coveted longs to lay it aside, and keeps repeating, ‘Will this year never end?’ another man thought it a great coup to win the chance of giving games but having given them he says, ‘when shall I be rid of them?’
“You will find to keep your busy more important activities than all those you have performed so energetically up to now.” (29)

Three. Seneca also condones that the midlife crisis is really a perfectly healthy thing, but to put off that crisis is a problem. You should spend the bulk of your time doing enriching stuff for yourself.

“how stupid to forget our mortality and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!”? (8)

Four. Finally, we should subvert our expectations of life success in the sense that what we do with our time is really not all that important in the grand scheme of things. So really, it should, like Burkeman says in his chapter on Cosmic Insignificance Therapy that fundamentally speaking, the universe and other people are out of our control. Usually, both of those things don’t give a shit about what we do with our time, so you might as well do something significant to you—that helps other people, that improves your life through doing something complicated, that conveys some knowledge you have to others to help them along on this one-way trip.

“We are in the habit of saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents who were allotted to us, that they were given to us by chance. But we can choose whose children we would like to be.” (25)
“Now while the blood is hot you should make your way with vigor to better things. In this kind of life you will find much that is worth your study: the love and practice of the virtues, forgetfulness of the passions, the knowledge of how to live and die, and a life of deep tranquility.” (31)
“Life has left some men struggling at the start of their careers before they could force their way to the height of their ambition…is it really so pleasant to die in harness? That is the feeling of man people: their desire for their work outlasts their ability to do it…Meanwhile, as they rob and are robbed as they disturb each other’s peace as they make each other miserable, their lives pass without satisfaction, without pleasure, without mental improvement…

Many seem to think that the first quote is about finding a mentor. I don’t think I have a specific mentor, but I have many people who have served as a kind of mentor for me. From my swimming coach to the writers, I worked with in college and graduate school, to what I’m reading now to sharing what I’ve learned from what I’ve read on this blog. It’s a good use of my time. And so has this book that I’ve been reading slowly from when the pandemic began to just before my five-year-old son got his first shot of the vaccine. It’s what has helped me become a better father, husband, and writer who practices Stoicism to be physically and mentally healthy. I hope you’ll give it a chance.

4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

Every weekday, I drive my kids to their pre-school/daycare. And almost every day, I see cars and parents rushing their kids to the door of the school, checking their Apple Watches because they have a meeting at 8:30, and trying to rush their kids to wash their hands, stand on the mat and sanitize their shoes, wait for their temperature to be taken, etc. And every time I see someone like that, I always think to myself—like I’m having a conversation with them— “What’s the rush? We’re all going to the same place.”

In the introduction to this book by Oliver Burkeman writes that “productivity is a trap,” In many ways, this is an anti-productivity book. It’s not filled with tips and tricks to squeeze more time out of your day to do the things that matter. First it starts with the simple fact that you should do the things that matter most to you first and then come with the understanding that you’ll never finish all of the items. That getting things done is actually impossible.

“ Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved ‘work-life balance,’ whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the ‘six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.’ The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do list have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life…let’s start by admitting to defeat: none of this is ever going to happen.”

While you might think that this is the most obvious thing you’ve ever heard, there are many lessons to learn here. I think that’s what we’re seeing with this great resignation, not Sarah Jaffe’s cringingly prominent book Work Won’t Love You Back. Of course, it doesn’t, work couldn’t care less about you, or me. And I think the Great Resignation is that a lot of Americans are realizing this and saying, fuck this. My time is worth more than being “productive.” There, I summarized that book and this whole moment in time to three sentences. Now go do whatever you want.

What captured this perfectly for me was when Burkeman often talks about his four-year-old son. That the kid is pure presence. On page 131, I had a series of Yes notations.

They are linked to watching his son’s fist close around his finger, his head turn in response to a noise, without obsessing over whether this “showed he was meeting his ‘developmental milestones’ or not, or what I ought to be doing to ensure that he did.”
Worse, Burkeman realizes that his obsession with using time well meant using his child as a tool for calming his anxiety by treating him like an employee with some future sense of security and peace of mind. To treat the child as if all childhood is nothing but a training ground for adulthood. He also points out that the baby trainers are wrong that the baby should not fall asleep on your chest, but it’s a beautiful experience in the present moment and that has to be weighed appropriately. The future cannot always take precedence…. Russian Philosopher Alexander Herzen writes that, “because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up, but a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment…Life’s bounty is its flow. Later is too late.” Like a pool, river, or lake. Like Dory said, just keep swimming.

Basically, the entire book is an extensive exercise in Stoicism’s memento mori idea, specifically Seneca’s On The Shortness of Life. But probably the most meaningful exercise from this book is actually doing the calculation of how many days you have in life. With four thousand weeks to your 80th birthday I figured out exactly how many days I have left until my 80th birthday, should I be lucky enough to live that long. I have 1,988 weeks until my 80th birthday or 13,917 days. Whatever happens in those days is something I have some control over, but mostly I don’t. Time doesn’t care, the universe doesn’t care, and neither does my work. This culminates in Chapter 13 on Cosmic Insignificance Theory:

“When things all seem too much, what better solace than the reminder that they are, provided you’re willing to zoom out a bit, indistinguishable from nothing at all? The anxieties that clutter the average life—relationship troubles, status rivalries, money worries—shrink instantly down to irrelevance. So do pandemics and presidencies, for that matter: the cosmos carries on regardless, calm and imperturbable. Or to quote the title of a book I once reviewed: /The Universe doesn’t Give a Flying Fuck About You/. To remember how little you matter, on a cosmic timescale, can feel like putting down a heavy burden that most of us didn’t realize we were carrying in the first place.”

So, like last week, when my two-year-old daughter had a sinus infection, I was on my way to drive her to school and drop her off because she could go to school. She says to me in the back seat, “Daddy, I don’t want to go to school.” Then, as if the universe heard her, I had a meeting canceled and I thought: yeah, why not? I canceled the rest of my commitments. Pushed a few items on my to-do list forward a day or a week (this post was one of them) and said, “Okay.” Then we went to a playground. We played in the leaves in the backyard, I gave her medication. We got a steamer at a local coffee shop and a donut. We took a nap and we watched some Bluey together on the couch. This might not have happened if this pandemic had not happened, and I didn’t read this book.

How I Take Smart Notes

The first time I started hearing about the Zettelkasten method was on Cal Newport’s podcast.

It seemed like it was more trouble than I wanted to engage in.

After reading this post, How to Take Smart Notes: 10 principles to revolutionize your note-taking and writing, I saw this as a system that filled in some of the blanks in stuff I was already doing.

But after hearing more about it through Austin Kleon, talking about reading Sonke Ahrens’s book, How to Take Smart Notes, I started reading it on Kindle.

I realized that I already cobbled this method together. About 70 percent of it. I use it through the Bear notes application and work through the process in my journals and pocket notebooks.

So to give you a summary of what I do, I’m going to explain the basics of my note-taking habit and how I marry that to this method. I won’t talk about what I ditched.

There are four kinds of notes, according to Ahrens:

Fleeting notes: where I take notes on the fly that are informal, short, and quick. I use my pocket notebook for these since I carry it around in my wallet. It’s typically a Field Notes notebooks. It’s just filled with questions, observations, and things I notice. I sometimes post these on Twitter about once a week.
Literature Notes: These are the ones that I use the most. They are notes that I take in physical books in the form of marginalia, and that usually goes to Instagram once a week. When I finish a book, I’ll collect all the pages that I fold over. I write a summary or review in the back of the book about what I learned or what I noticed that attracted my eye. For example: this post on Benjamin Percy’s The Ninth Metal.
Permanent Note: from the literature note, I’ll make a permanent note in Bear and save it as a doc in my Dropbox, then I’ll edit it a few times and post it to my blog.
Reference Notes: These are digital things I read on Kindle that will get a short summary in Bear (like a paragraph), and I’ll usually talk about it in my newsletter.

Really what this process solved for me is what I do with books or articles I read online or on Kindle. Kindle’s highlighting and note feature is about as good as that device is ever going to get and I don’t care for it. So the method I worked around concerning literature notes with Kindle is using notecards to write out the particular things I highlighted or noticed, then that goes into Bear. I tag it with a specific theme, the author, or a concept connected to it.

I know the magic of this method is when a bunch of unrelated permanent notes reaches a critical mass that’s when you have new connections to make. But that’s not really been the case for me yet. I’ve found that paraphrasing what I read, looking it over, is enough. For example, I’ll tag everything that I wrote over a season. Let’s say this summer, so I’ll use the 2021/summer tag and get a bird’s eye view of every note that I put in throughout a season. I wrote 137 notes over the course of the summer, that’s roughly two notes a day all summer, and I came up with one essay idea, and one short story idea.

When I look at the weekly newsletters I write that include my reference notes, notes I take on books, and references to other articles I get a picture of what I write about and how that interests me. This is not something I had before the summer. Sure, I had a general idea, but not the hard evidence of what it is that I notice and read about, and therefore come up with things that no one is writing about.

For example, writing about practicing Stoicism when you’re neurodiverse is something that is barely written about. Massimo Pigliucci has one article on it. There’s an article by Anna Joy Tanksley on practicing Stoicism as an Aspergian. There’s a great article by Sophia on employing the dichotomy of control to neurodiversity and practicing Stoicism helped with ADHD. But mostly, men don’t cover it at all.

Ryan Holiday doesn’t cover it, and William Irvine mentions the limits of Stoicism on his website. Donald Robertson–a cognitive behavioral therapist doesn’t touch it at all other than saying you should get a diagnosis. Instead he focuses primarily on the negative emotions that are all too frequent when you’re neurodiverse, like being quick to anger, anxiety, and depression. So that gave me the idea that’s something I’m going to specialize in, because none of the people currently writing about Stoicism are neurodiverse, so perhaps, they don’t feel like that’s something can write about, because it is not their personal experience.

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

This was tremendous fun, a perfect fantasy book that I can’t help but see the threads that dance between this and The Name of the Wind, Harry Potter, and a lot more that I’ve read before. But what struck the me hardest is not so much the content as the lines. There are a lot of liens that I circled and underlined that I absolutely loved. For example:

“A white tree he made spring up from the stone floor. Its branches touched the high roof beams of the hall, and on every twig of every branch a golden apple shone, each a sun, for it was the Year-Tree. A bird flew among the branches suddenly, all white with a tail like a fall of snow, and the golden apples dimming turned to seeds, each one a drop of crystal. These falling from the tree with a sound like rain, all at once there came a sweet fragrance while the tree, swaying, put forth leaves of rosy fire and white flowers like stars.”

Many of the heroic stories in this book are called songs or “Deed of…” whatever character—and that’s what this book reads like—a song. Throughout this book I’m making sentence diagrams of the things, but most especially, I see an old familiar.

But most especially, the book gives me this sense that I’m swimming in a river of words, or a sea.

The Ninth Metal by Benjamin Percy

This book is Benjamin Percy’s masterpiece. It’s the best work of fiction from him that I’ve read, and I’ve read them all at this point. Things that stood out to me the most were the principal themes of family and duty to that family colliding with the law, lawlessness, and a sense of justice that is personal that comes into direct conflict with the government conception of law, order, and justice and this sets fire to a place that is barely being held together. It’s a naturalist novel.

It’s peppered with beautiful descriptions of the natural world. It represents the ingredients of a naturalist novel in how a main character’s sheltered, hereditary, or everyday existence comes into direct conflict with the outside world. In the Ninth Metal, this is brought on by the conflict between two families: The Frontiers and Gundersons and their prodigal sons: John Frontier and Hawkin Gunderson. Both of them come into direct conflict from the prologue to page 288. They are the personal antagonists of the two main characters.

The naturalist or external antagonist for the Frontiers is Black Dog mining in Northfield, Minnesota. For the Gundersons, it’s the Department of Defense. Both are fighting over control of the mining of omnimetal that was brought here by a comet and grants powers to John and Hawkin.

So this is an X-Men story. Mother Gunderson and her followers are Magneto’s brotherhood and their religious/cult-like overtones worshipping the omnimetal (their chanting of “Metal is” recalls “Darkseid is.”), and the Frontiers are Xavier’s students. Hawkin Gunderson is Magneto, imprisoned by the Department of Defense (or the Nazis, if you’re going to follow my Magneto origin story through line). John Frontier is Wolverine who has a familial Stoic duty, which very nearly brings about his undoing.

It’s very much a local vs. outsiders story because locals almost always lose in a naturalist novel. Not this time, though, but that’s straying dangerously into spoilers.

What made this book so good for my journey as a writer these last two years. But it comes with a dilemma: I don’t know where Percy ends, and I begin. We don’t have the same ideas for stories, but we deal in similar themes: family, social sciences, and the slightest bit of the fantastic set in a world we live in now. It’s like we have similar voices, we’re of the same generation—he’s only a year and a half older than me. To be successful in the ways that I want to be and have come up short because of one thing: I did not submit my work, and Percy did, allowing him to grow where I have been playing at the same four books more or less the last fifteen years.

But I’m not going to play that anymore. Here’s what solidified why I have a book like this one in me, but here’s where it landed for me that Percy and I think along the same wavelengths.

Over the years in his cell, Hawkin had a lot of time to think, and one of the ways he occupied himself was by pretending. Comic books owned his imagination. He had always liked Batman, best of all the superheroes. It was more than his haunting mask and the militaristic Batmobile and the gadgets he kept in his utility belt and the way he crouched like a gargoyle on Gotham’s skyscrapers with his leathery cape fluttering in the wind. It was the villains. The villains who made up his rogues’ gallery were the best of any series. Because they weren’t merely masked and spandex weirdoes to punch and kick and throw Batarangs at. They meant something. They really mattered emotionally. If Batman was order, then the Joker was chaos. Mr. Freeze represented Bruce Wayne’s emotional coldness. Ra’s al Ghul was the father figure wanted desperately but had to reject for his sinister ways. Two-Face captured the constant battle between Wayne and the Dark Knight. What you eventually came to understand, if you read enough comic books, was that Batman was a unification of his worst enemies. ..
…
Dr. Gunn is the Joker and Scarecrow and Mr. Freeze and Penguin and Ra’s al Ghul and all the rest of them. And this is Hawkin’s Crime Alley, where Thomas and Martha Wayne fell in a rain of bullets and blood and pearls. It was a moment of fusion, convergence. Here is the villain and here is the place and here is the core wound that Hawkin might conquer if he is going to come into his power as a hero. That’s the way the rules work.
–Ninth Metal, pg. 280

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green.

I started listening to this podcast back in the beginning of the pandemic, and it has been an almost weekly joy to listen to, so when the book came out, I knew I had to have it. What I found was pretty formulaic: introduction, research which shows Green’s OCD in full-effect with his details for getting the facts right. Highlights include talking about Edmund Halley and his many talents, or what went into making Diet Dr Pepper. This was always great in whatever essay I read–I always learned something new, which is awesome. This is followed by literary allusion, and the positive side of whatever Green is reviewing and his rating.

The best entries in this book are in the introduction and the postscript, and the DFW-like footnotes. My favorite essay is on Indianapolis, and the bits are like how they are the absolute best parts of our pandemic moment. The book is like a time capsule. Here are my favorite parts

On “Our Temporal Range, which makes an allusion to Stoicism’s “View From Above” in an impressive display of time condensing:

“The hard part, evolutionarily, was getting from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic ones, then getting from single-celled organisms to multi cellar ones. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. Instead let’s imagine’s Earth’s history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1 and today being December 31 at 11:59pm. The first life on Earth emerges around February 25. Photosynthetic organisms first appear in late March. Multicellular life doesn’t appear until August or September. The first dinosaurs like eoraptor show up about 230 million years ago, or December 13 in our calendar year. The meteor impact that heralds the end of the dinosaurs happens around December 26. Homo sapiens aren’t part of the story until December 31 at 11:48 pm. ..”

He then says that the Industrial Revolution, the dishwasher, and cars happen in the last couple of seconds of December 31.

On CNN: “What’s news isn’t primarily what is noteworthy or important, but what is new.” Saying that is basically all twenty-four news channels are good for. The newest outrage, misery, and disaster.

But my favorite essay is on Indianapolis, where Green and his family have made their home since 2007. He moved there from New York City, and he lays down a considerable number of disses on the city. All of which I laughed at:

“Indianapolis has tried o a lot of mottoes and catchphrases over the years. Indianapolis is ‘Raising the Game.’ ‘You put the I in Indy.’ ‘Crossroads of America.’ But I’d propose a different motto: “Indianapolis: You gotta live somewhere.’…

“Someone once told me that Indianapolis is among the nation’s leading test markets for new restaurant chains, because the city is so thoroughly average. Indeed, it ranks among the top so-called ‘microcosm cities,’ because Indianapolis is more typically American than almost any other place. We are spectacular in our ordinariness. The city’s nicknames include “Naptown,” because it’s boring, “India-no-place.”

He then goes on to rate the city four stars because it’s home.

I’ve long said that Indiana’s nickname of the Crossroads of America is because why the hell would you ever want to stay here? And even though Green goes onto say that the city is one of the most economically and racially diverse zip codes in the United States. The problem is, of course, that the rest of the state is rural white and super-Republican and is actively working against that diversity, and has adopted many of the voting rights laws that are being passed in Republican states across the nation. Eventually, if this goes unchecked, Indiana will be so vanilla that it’ll be see-through.

Though I think it’s generally acceptable to live in Indy and Bloomington, they are just about the only places you would want to live. Green even cites that the White River, its main waterway, is completely non-navigable. The city dumps raw sewage into it. When I look around Bloomington, I see every college town I’ve ever visited. I’ve even taught here. It’s called the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. I’ve been here before in Princeton, NJ, Providence, Rhode Island, and College Park, Maryland. It’s a college town. I bet you go to any large college town like this one, and you’ve likely been to Bloomington before too. Not that there’s anything wrong with that other than it’s normal. Average.

I give the book, and really the state as a whole, three stars.

How I leave Literature Notes at the end of books.

A Guide to the Good Life by William B. Irvine

There’s a lot to unpack here about this book, but it’s been an absolute best thing about 2021 so far is William Irvine’s work on Stoicism, from his meditation series on Sam Harris’s Waking Up application to this book. It’s allowed me to construct a frame—or a comic book panel on every page of the last two years since my diagnosis and everything that has happened from the pandemic to my house that features three other people who need me to be well. It’s safe to say that I don’t know where I would be physically or mentally if it weren’t for Irvine’s work.

There are far too many lessons from this book that I cannot enumerate here and make it a reasonably sized blog post, but here are a few:

Negative Visualization

It is where you imagine something you like about your present circumstances and imagine if that something is gone. Specifically, this means your job, your house, your children, or your partner.

At PSC, I realized that was my dream job, and I let it go without a second thought: Irvine defines this as a hedonic adaptation, where we work hard to get something in college, get on the proper career path, then spend years making slow but steady progress toward our goal. So when I landed the dream job (PSC as a full-time instructor), I felt in control even though I was not. Grumbling about pay, coworkers, the institution, and the failure to recognize talents. I threw all of that away because I was overconfident (66-67).
On hedonic adaptation, where we find ourselves living the life of our dreams, we start taking that life for granted. Then I spend time enjoying my good fortune and forming new, grander visions for myself. .. (72)
It is not a rich person’s philosophy. People who have a pretty good life (me) can benefit from this philosophy and the poor. Those who are poor will prevent them from doing many things. It will not preclude them from negative visualization, like his Dream Life meditation in the Stoic Path app. (72)
By helping my parents pack up the LP house as the last time, I would step in that house (84)

One of the biggest things that I took away from this book is the Dichotomy of Control, which is something that initially attracted me to Stoicism in the first place. After reading this book, though, I figured out that I have a saying that I’ve heard throughout my life growing up in the Adirondacks: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad gear, and bad attitudes.” This phrase encapsulates all of Stoicism for me, but especially the Dichotomy of Control. Irvine asserts that it is a trichotomy of control:

Things over which we have no control at all: whether it will rain tomorrow or “No such thing as bad weather….” Epictetus’s Advice: we should not concern ourselves with these things
We have some but not complete control: whether we win the job, get the publishing deal, etc. Advice: we should concern ourselves with these things, but we should be careful to internalize the goals we form regarding these things or “bad gear,” there is just “gear” and how you use it. You can prepare by getting in the right headspace, blocking social media, reading deeply, and revising the piece you’re working on–that’s all you have some control over.
Things over which you have complete control: your attitude, always. We should concern ourselves with these things.

This helped me form my primary writing goal:

My primary writing duty is to take time every day to write 3 pages of personal essays, journaling, comics, or prose fiction and get it good enough to be submitted. No matter how many times you have to revise the piece but at minimum five times.

The rest is out of my control and not worth overly concerning myself.

Category Archives: Books I Read