The fine mess I have made of the new year, and the corrective.
2017-01-05
It is the fifth of January, and I have already failed in my resolution never to find myself again reduced to a human soup, poured onto a couch, simmering black as a blood pudding in emotional and intellectual crisis. I am the shrinking species of violet Émilie du Châtelet was thinking of when she wrote "One must know what one wants to be. In the latter endeavors irresolution produces false steps, and in the life of the mind confused ideas." Well, every moment in life is its latest endeavor, so irresolution is always causing me straits, which I navigate poorly.The catalyst for all this spiritual malaise is manifold, as effects always are. It could be that my wife was working too much of late, and paid me no heed, in the evenings and the holidays, for longer than my pride would naturally permit. She's Chinese and works in a Chinese company, so they were bound to abuse her goodwill and ethic in order to have her working fourteen hours a day and weekends, too. I've told her not to stand for it, and she has promised to say a word to the relevant taskmasters, but I fear her native restraint will keep her from making too much of a fuss and we'll be back to the couch and soup before long because her laowai husband feels the sting of neglect.
Was not this supposed to be the country of Marx and workers rights?
It's hard to be too critical of China, though, because another party to my spiritual oppression must be my benighted America, which has lately elected to the office of president its very own tyrant. The term is pejorative but also searingly accurate; no fitter subject for the title has presented its monstrous head in the history of our republic than Trump, who is a ridiculous pustule of a man stepped straight from the pages of satire. We've got our own heaving, bloviating, vacuous, carnival barker of a petty Pantagruel, his mind pickled, as Rabelais would have said "in the scorn of fortuitous things." It's grim to see the beginning of the end of the empire. One begins to understand a little the feeling of Qu Yuan, who hurled himself in a river over his heartbreak at the destruction of Chu.
Well, I won't be as dramatic as that. I shall have to write soon about how my Chinese brethren can prevent the sorts of missteps America has made; there is a real social mess to untangle there, and it would be instructive for me, as well.
And, after all, there is much good in the world to remember. My desk has two tomes of Aristotle, Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France", and the first volume of Marx's Capital all asking me to reread them. Getting oneself an education is blessedly cheap, if only people are interested. There is this free blog, too, which will give me a place to write a little in the mornings, as Paul Valery did, though I don't presume to make a monument as great as his; still, it's good to have goals, things to be resolute about, in the New Year. These external worries, of course, are external, and we cannot blame the outside world for our own misconduct. It's up to me, as a function of will, to scrape my soup into a container in the shape of a man.
Well, I won't be as dramatic as that. I shall have to write soon about how my Chinese brethren can prevent the sorts of missteps America has made; there is a real social mess to untangle there, and it would be instructive for me, as well.
And, after all, there is much good in the world to remember. My desk has two tomes of Aristotle, Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France", and the first volume of Marx's Capital all asking me to reread them. Getting oneself an education is blessedly cheap, if only people are interested. There is this free blog, too, which will give me a place to write a little in the mornings, as Paul Valery did, though I don't presume to make a monument as great as his; still, it's good to have goals, things to be resolute about, in the New Year. These external worries, of course, are external, and we cannot blame the outside world for our own misconduct. It's up to me, as a function of will, to scrape my soup into a container in the shape of a man.
I don't like the Huffington Post very much, in fact. It is as far to the left as the Southern Baptist Convention is to the right.
Trump hasn't shown himself to be at all thick-skinned. He's constantly reacting to things in the media (on Twitter) in a most unseemly, and unpresidential, fashion.
Donald Trump would definitely be set off if he got to read your words about him, as he is widely seen as thin-skinned, however, he also has to be thick-skinned enough to keep going when so much unflattering media coverage of him make the rounds on and off the internet everyday.
By the way, I have never seen a news media that is more dedicated to Trump-bashing than Huffington Post, I bet whatever stories about Donald it publishes will resonate with you greatly.
Comment