I'm really sorry that your health is not improving, and admire both your courage in dealing with it and generosity in sharing these insecurities and reflections. It is of course ridiculously self-evident to any of your followers and probably to your rational self, that even by oppressive societal standards you *have* achieved and produced far more than most people and more importantly, by non-oppressive standards as well. (Hell, even from a crass marketing perspective you have managed to carve out a distinctive popular niche in the academic blogosphere that few could ever hope to attain, even while remaining true to yourself). But obviously this isn't the point.
What's fascinating to me is how relative this calculus can be. I mean, if you had *any* idea of how little I've done or accomplished - even by "soft" humanistic standards.....That you've raised a family and had a fulltime career alone is already like gods to men (even without touching and inspiring thousands of readers). So if you haven't done much of real significance, then I would barely deserve to exist. And if I haven't done anything of real significance, I can think of a few other people who might conclude they barely exist. But clearly it doesn't work this way: linearly or in ratio scales. It's more like theory of relativity or maybe quantum physics: the more accomplished and successful you are, the higher the bar; the higher the bar, the less your accomplishments ever mattered. You work harder and harder to accumulate more "matter" (pun intended) so you can work harder. Eventually it goes quantum when the absurdity exceeds the acceleration. I really have come to the conclusion that what matters most is what we want (and hope, since we don't have so much control anyway) from the future, and how we live in the present, but the past is all bonus; you can't screw it up because it already happened, and it's yours to treasure, regrets or not. Because it's yours. Whether someone wrote enough or contributed "enough" or lived "enough," is orthogonal to that. (I suppose I am operating on the assumption that regret is relevant to bad stuff you've done and important stuff you've done badly, but not *how much* you've done or how great it was).
You mention the importance of standing by your own values. I think this is true for both the plural and the singular: standing by your values; one of which is your own inherent value. But then for you there is also the second-person: all the readers and former students who clearly value you. You don't even need to accomplish anything anymore for that last one - you get it for free!
Thank you for sharing this. It seems like illness and doubt is everywhere right now and getting older seems more and more like growing smaller and smaller. I haven't really been able to write or even sit down at the piano just to play a little. Time is filled up with other people's needs and documenting what is going on and not building anything toward the future. Everything is on hold. I can only imagine how it feels when you are unwell and receiving treatment that takes your strength even as it tries to heal you. Those intrusive thoughts suddenly have a way in. Listening to this Dowland piece, trying to just focus on the voices and separate each one, kept mine out. Keep listening. Keep being. Wishing you wellness and strength. X
I think many creative people could relate to you and your natural, "unquiet thoughts'' - indeed I do. I wholeheartedly wish you strength and determination and the best of lucks, Humanity needs plenty of special, thoughtful, sensible, generous, lucid, inspiring constructive people as I think you are. I have only recently met you by a glimpse of some of your latest writings and posts online, but I can already feel that.
I want to tell you that yesterday I was thinking of Kafka and Max Brod. I'm quite sure that Kafka must have felt something like that he hadn't written anything that has real significance or impact. And I agree with you - not for a second in his whole life it was more or less valuable because of what he wrote or didn't wrote, but for sure he was Kafka all the time, and very probably, he also felt humbly that he didn't merit any validation apart from what the society of its own time gave to him - what is published, published will remain, all the rest of his impressive, invaluable work, was set to be destroyed by the fire, as he asked Max Brod. Brod probably loved him enough to know better, and appreciated his work enough to do better, and he saved his writings for all of us, for the sheer good of humankind, as well as for him.
Me too, I am an aspiring writer, and I have found myself thinking more and more often similar thoughts as your unquiet ones. I don't know, I always remind the way Victor Hugo talked about himself ("I am nothing, I know, but I compose my nothingness with a little bit of everything", or when he asked an English minister for the pardon to someone who was about to be executed, "we are nothing, I am a grain of dust talking to a grain of dirt", I quote from memory, sorry not to recall the details)... Indeed, we are all too small to really count as much as our infant ego always dreamt about us from childhood and all that we could one day become... Anyway, it is probably not for us to decide our importance of the impact of what we are or what we can do will have on the world, but what we are is truly precious by itself, and what we can do is also precious by itself. It's only a question of time that Humankind, if we remain alive and growing and evolving around in some part of the cosmos, may forget us all (nowadays all) and most of what we have known, may forget Homer and Beethoven, may forget even planet Earth when that time comes... No matter, they will be thriving and be standing on our shoulders, as we stand on the shoulders of the many lives who preceded us. And there is a kind of beauty in that: we are like little cells of an evolving body, but all of us have a small but very key, deterministic contribution to what we are together, and what we do in life. Our egos are not more important than the little machines inside our marvelous, tiny brighting minds, to make us keep going and advance, like a smart instinctive mechanism that nature somehow put on us on its blind, but fortunate, bet on intelligence as a tool for us to develop and become... better and better at meeting what we are - human.
I just wanted to know that what you already have done counts, that what you are doing every time that you write and share your thoughts and your ideas, sensibilities and delicacies, every time you share a part of your own light, that counts, and sometimes that can count a lot to somebody else. And I wanted to let you know that what you have written today, dear almost-nothing in the other side of the world, will be kept in the mind and the heart of this other almost-nothing who is writing you from Spain, and who have just felt all this connection with your words out of its own force, out of the shared feeling that you capture and develop so well, as if by conjured it you took the poison out of it, so I feel compelled to help you out with the task.
Now go ahead and please, get better. I will become one of your readers, as many people, and I know for sure that you have so many more beautiful, meaningful things to share with all of us. What you did is already something, and the extra somethingness that you will do will be something valuable as well, but you are right to point out that there is no sense in seeking validation for that. I guess what you are looking for is purely sense, a sense for all the path, all the hopes and adversities and learnings. You don't need to be productive but you need to have been productive, to have contributed to humankind and to this beautiful world we share between us, standing on our ancestors' shoulders and becoming our offspring's ones. I think I can understand that need, because I totally share it. And I want you to know, fellow human, that you have touched my heart and my mind with your fellow light, and that is a little something already, that I will recall everytime I think of all this for the rest of my life. And I want to thank you for that, and I would like you to know it. You already count, you know that better than me as you know yourself like anyone - but you already count, and always have. And you will. But now you have to get better and healthier, to become a brighter light to share in this incredible ribbon of times and generations we all take part in.
With my admiration and solidarity, with best wishes for your recovery,
one of billions of your fellow little almost-nothings, from Northern Spain,
Also, I've realized that hyper-competitive markets do not necessarily make for better people in that field, even if we were to be purely "meritocratic" (whatever that may mean). Because it leads to people who are highly specialized, who let their joys whither all for the single-minded pursuit of the good of being part of the profession.
Specialisation has done untold damage in philosophy. It leads to an in-group replying to each other. Further, it is of the essence of philosophy that it should be wide-ranging. Narrow compass = inferior philosophy
Hi Helen I can't add much to what more erudite folk have written. Just want to say I enjoy your Twitter posts and so followed you here where I hope to read you in more depth. I've also started posting on Substack. I'm finding I'm thinking about this theme too and getting myself used to the idea that I'm not gonna do it all or work it all out. Seb
I typically have had these "unquiet thoughts" when thinking about choices I have made - life, love, career - and whether I have made the right ones. In my life, on my own with no children to provide an automatic sense of accomplishment and legacy, I think about life and time spent on career in terms of how well I have used my talents to their fullest, highest purpose. In the first paragraph of his book No Man Is an Island, Thomas Merton, wrote:
“Why do we spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be? If only we knew what we wanted. Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were made for?”
I guess that is also still too goal focused, Calvinist even.
Pope Francis, in his encyclical letter published October 2020, Fratelli Tutti, on fraternity and social friendship, spoke of how Saint Francis “did not wage a war of words aimed at imposing doctrines; he simply spread the love of God.” The Pope writes:
The New Testament describes one fruit of the Holy Spirit (cf. Gal 5:22) as agathosyne; the Greek word expresses attachment to the good, pursuit of the good. Even more, it suggests a striving for excellence and what is best for others, their growth in maturity and health, the cultivation of values and not simply material well being.
A similar expression exists in Latin: benevolentia. This is an attitude that “wills the good” of others; it bespeaks a yearning for goodness, an inclination towards all that is fine and excellent, a desire to fill the lives of others with what is beautiful, sublime and edifying.
I like to think that my choices of teaching and writing strive to realize these ideals. I know your work has doubtless done the same for others.
I gave a eulogy a few years back for my uncle, a Chicago Police detective who was also a veteran of Korean war. He was not a totally perfect or always "good" man but he was a loyal brother to my father, a faithful husband, a loving father, and a very memorable uncle! I finished with this poem:
We live in deed not years; in thoughts not breaths; in feelings not in figures on a dial.
We should count time by heartthrobs. He most lives who thinks most, feels noblest, acts best.
And he whose heart beats quickest lives the longest: Lives in one hour more than in years do some whose fat blood seeps as it slips along their veins.
Life’s but a means to an end; that end, Beginning, mean, and end to all things—God.
Commenting on Jason Stanley wanting to be read in 200 years, this could only be said by someone who did not believe in intellectual progress, at least in their own discipline. No one (except historians of thought) reads Galileo or Newton or (except on a handful of issues that are still unresolved) Einstein.
Well I think here philosophy may be an outlier discipline, and it just goes to show the affinity of philosophy with literature, because we still read Plato or Nagarjuna, and they can still surprise us and give us new insights. And we can still read Newton this way too (not his work on mechanics, but e.g., his philosophy of religion)
In economics, there are still insights to be had from a few of the greats: Smith, Mill, and Keynes come to mind. But all of these were philosophers as well as economists.
And given our propensity for error, we’d do a better job, and have some more humility, if we paid more attention to the debates and experience of the last 100 years or so (going back to the Great Depression), rather than chasing the latest hot trend, we we mostly do.
Now that I have begun to face my own health problems, as well as the natural process of 'aging', I wish I appreciated my health and youth when I still had it. In my "previous" life, I was an academic, and I can definitely understand everything you were saying about the pressures involved. I still feel that today, but in different ways. It's definitely something I've been working on lately.
Hi Helen, I first became aware of your writing with the essay, Climate Crisis and Self-realisation. I have shared this piece with numerous friend and colleagues. Since then I have been what Stephen King might call a faithful reader! I came across a book by Trappist monk Brother Paul Quenon - In Praise of the Useless Life, a copy of which I have yet failed to get my hands on! Would that we had more "useless" people in the world other than those engaged with the useful invention and production of weapons of destruction, with the extractive industries, with industries that destroy, pollute,...
For what it's worth (!) I wrote this little sonnet a while back which kind of addresses this subject:
I'm really sorry that your health is not improving, and admire both your courage in dealing with it and generosity in sharing these insecurities and reflections. It is of course ridiculously self-evident to any of your followers and probably to your rational self, that even by oppressive societal standards you *have* achieved and produced far more than most people and more importantly, by non-oppressive standards as well. (Hell, even from a crass marketing perspective you have managed to carve out a distinctive popular niche in the academic blogosphere that few could ever hope to attain, even while remaining true to yourself). But obviously this isn't the point.
What's fascinating to me is how relative this calculus can be. I mean, if you had *any* idea of how little I've done or accomplished - even by "soft" humanistic standards.....That you've raised a family and had a fulltime career alone is already like gods to men (even without touching and inspiring thousands of readers). So if you haven't done much of real significance, then I would barely deserve to exist. And if I haven't done anything of real significance, I can think of a few other people who might conclude they barely exist. But clearly it doesn't work this way: linearly or in ratio scales. It's more like theory of relativity or maybe quantum physics: the more accomplished and successful you are, the higher the bar; the higher the bar, the less your accomplishments ever mattered. You work harder and harder to accumulate more "matter" (pun intended) so you can work harder. Eventually it goes quantum when the absurdity exceeds the acceleration. I really have come to the conclusion that what matters most is what we want (and hope, since we don't have so much control anyway) from the future, and how we live in the present, but the past is all bonus; you can't screw it up because it already happened, and it's yours to treasure, regrets or not. Because it's yours. Whether someone wrote enough or contributed "enough" or lived "enough," is orthogonal to that. (I suppose I am operating on the assumption that regret is relevant to bad stuff you've done and important stuff you've done badly, but not *how much* you've done or how great it was).
You mention the importance of standing by your own values. I think this is true for both the plural and the singular: standing by your values; one of which is your own inherent value. But then for you there is also the second-person: all the readers and former students who clearly value you. You don't even need to accomplish anything anymore for that last one - you get it for free!
Thank you for sharing this. It seems like illness and doubt is everywhere right now and getting older seems more and more like growing smaller and smaller. I haven't really been able to write or even sit down at the piano just to play a little. Time is filled up with other people's needs and documenting what is going on and not building anything toward the future. Everything is on hold. I can only imagine how it feels when you are unwell and receiving treatment that takes your strength even as it tries to heal you. Those intrusive thoughts suddenly have a way in. Listening to this Dowland piece, trying to just focus on the voices and separate each one, kept mine out. Keep listening. Keep being. Wishing you wellness and strength. X
Dear Helen,
I think many creative people could relate to you and your natural, "unquiet thoughts'' - indeed I do. I wholeheartedly wish you strength and determination and the best of lucks, Humanity needs plenty of special, thoughtful, sensible, generous, lucid, inspiring constructive people as I think you are. I have only recently met you by a glimpse of some of your latest writings and posts online, but I can already feel that.
I want to tell you that yesterday I was thinking of Kafka and Max Brod. I'm quite sure that Kafka must have felt something like that he hadn't written anything that has real significance or impact. And I agree with you - not for a second in his whole life it was more or less valuable because of what he wrote or didn't wrote, but for sure he was Kafka all the time, and very probably, he also felt humbly that he didn't merit any validation apart from what the society of its own time gave to him - what is published, published will remain, all the rest of his impressive, invaluable work, was set to be destroyed by the fire, as he asked Max Brod. Brod probably loved him enough to know better, and appreciated his work enough to do better, and he saved his writings for all of us, for the sheer good of humankind, as well as for him.
Me too, I am an aspiring writer, and I have found myself thinking more and more often similar thoughts as your unquiet ones. I don't know, I always remind the way Victor Hugo talked about himself ("I am nothing, I know, but I compose my nothingness with a little bit of everything", or when he asked an English minister for the pardon to someone who was about to be executed, "we are nothing, I am a grain of dust talking to a grain of dirt", I quote from memory, sorry not to recall the details)... Indeed, we are all too small to really count as much as our infant ego always dreamt about us from childhood and all that we could one day become... Anyway, it is probably not for us to decide our importance of the impact of what we are or what we can do will have on the world, but what we are is truly precious by itself, and what we can do is also precious by itself. It's only a question of time that Humankind, if we remain alive and growing and evolving around in some part of the cosmos, may forget us all (nowadays all) and most of what we have known, may forget Homer and Beethoven, may forget even planet Earth when that time comes... No matter, they will be thriving and be standing on our shoulders, as we stand on the shoulders of the many lives who preceded us. And there is a kind of beauty in that: we are like little cells of an evolving body, but all of us have a small but very key, deterministic contribution to what we are together, and what we do in life. Our egos are not more important than the little machines inside our marvelous, tiny brighting minds, to make us keep going and advance, like a smart instinctive mechanism that nature somehow put on us on its blind, but fortunate, bet on intelligence as a tool for us to develop and become... better and better at meeting what we are - human.
I just wanted to know that what you already have done counts, that what you are doing every time that you write and share your thoughts and your ideas, sensibilities and delicacies, every time you share a part of your own light, that counts, and sometimes that can count a lot to somebody else. And I wanted to let you know that what you have written today, dear almost-nothing in the other side of the world, will be kept in the mind and the heart of this other almost-nothing who is writing you from Spain, and who have just felt all this connection with your words out of its own force, out of the shared feeling that you capture and develop so well, as if by conjured it you took the poison out of it, so I feel compelled to help you out with the task.
Now go ahead and please, get better. I will become one of your readers, as many people, and I know for sure that you have so many more beautiful, meaningful things to share with all of us. What you did is already something, and the extra somethingness that you will do will be something valuable as well, but you are right to point out that there is no sense in seeking validation for that. I guess what you are looking for is purely sense, a sense for all the path, all the hopes and adversities and learnings. You don't need to be productive but you need to have been productive, to have contributed to humankind and to this beautiful world we share between us, standing on our ancestors' shoulders and becoming our offspring's ones. I think I can understand that need, because I totally share it. And I want you to know, fellow human, that you have touched my heart and my mind with your fellow light, and that is a little something already, that I will recall everytime I think of all this for the rest of my life. And I want to thank you for that, and I would like you to know it. You already count, you know that better than me as you know yourself like anyone - but you already count, and always have. And you will. But now you have to get better and healthier, to become a brighter light to share in this incredible ribbon of times and generations we all take part in.
With my admiration and solidarity, with best wishes for your recovery,
one of billions of your fellow little almost-nothings, from Northern Spain,
Jose
(José Álvarez Díaz, journalist, aspiring writer, fellow human)
Academia, at least in UK, was not a rat race when I joined in 1970. Things are much harder for people now, more's the pity.
Also, I've realized that hyper-competitive markets do not necessarily make for better people in that field, even if we were to be purely "meritocratic" (whatever that may mean). Because it leads to people who are highly specialized, who let their joys whither all for the single-minded pursuit of the good of being part of the profession.
Specialisation has done untold damage in philosophy. It leads to an in-group replying to each other. Further, it is of the essence of philosophy that it should be wide-ranging. Narrow compass = inferior philosophy
Hi Helen I can't add much to what more erudite folk have written. Just want to say I enjoy your Twitter posts and so followed you here where I hope to read you in more depth. I've also started posting on Substack. I'm finding I'm thinking about this theme too and getting myself used to the idea that I'm not gonna do it all or work it all out. Seb
Dear Helen,
I typically have had these "unquiet thoughts" when thinking about choices I have made - life, love, career - and whether I have made the right ones. In my life, on my own with no children to provide an automatic sense of accomplishment and legacy, I think about life and time spent on career in terms of how well I have used my talents to their fullest, highest purpose. In the first paragraph of his book No Man Is an Island, Thomas Merton, wrote:
“Why do we spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be? If only we knew what we wanted. Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were made for?”
I guess that is also still too goal focused, Calvinist even.
Pope Francis, in his encyclical letter published October 2020, Fratelli Tutti, on fraternity and social friendship, spoke of how Saint Francis “did not wage a war of words aimed at imposing doctrines; he simply spread the love of God.” The Pope writes:
The New Testament describes one fruit of the Holy Spirit (cf. Gal 5:22) as agathosyne; the Greek word expresses attachment to the good, pursuit of the good. Even more, it suggests a striving for excellence and what is best for others, their growth in maturity and health, the cultivation of values and not simply material well being.
A similar expression exists in Latin: benevolentia. This is an attitude that “wills the good” of others; it bespeaks a yearning for goodness, an inclination towards all that is fine and excellent, a desire to fill the lives of others with what is beautiful, sublime and edifying.
I like to think that my choices of teaching and writing strive to realize these ideals. I know your work has doubtless done the same for others.
I gave a eulogy a few years back for my uncle, a Chicago Police detective who was also a veteran of Korean war. He was not a totally perfect or always "good" man but he was a loyal brother to my father, a faithful husband, a loving father, and a very memorable uncle! I finished with this poem:
We live in deed not years; in thoughts not breaths; in feelings not in figures on a dial.
We should count time by heartthrobs. He most lives who thinks most, feels noblest, acts best.
And he whose heart beats quickest lives the longest: Lives in one hour more than in years do some whose fat blood seeps as it slips along their veins.
Life’s but a means to an end; that end, Beginning, mean, and end to all things—God.
The dead have all the glory of the world.
Phillip James Bailey
Wishing you all the best Helen. Your newsletter is a breath of fresh air!
Best wishes for a recovery from this setback.
Commenting on Jason Stanley wanting to be read in 200 years, this could only be said by someone who did not believe in intellectual progress, at least in their own discipline. No one (except historians of thought) reads Galileo or Newton or (except on a handful of issues that are still unresolved) Einstein.
Well I think here philosophy may be an outlier discipline, and it just goes to show the affinity of philosophy with literature, because we still read Plato or Nagarjuna, and they can still surprise us and give us new insights. And we can still read Newton this way too (not his work on mechanics, but e.g., his philosophy of religion)
In economics, there are still insights to be had from a few of the greats: Smith, Mill, and Keynes come to mind. But all of these were philosophers as well as economists.
And given our propensity for error, we’d do a better job, and have some more humility, if we paid more attention to the debates and experience of the last 100 years or so (going back to the Great Depression), rather than chasing the latest hot trend, we we mostly do.
Now that I have begun to face my own health problems, as well as the natural process of 'aging', I wish I appreciated my health and youth when I still had it. In my "previous" life, I was an academic, and I can definitely understand everything you were saying about the pressures involved. I still feel that today, but in different ways. It's definitely something I've been working on lately.
Hi Helen, I first became aware of your writing with the essay, Climate Crisis and Self-realisation. I have shared this piece with numerous friend and colleagues. Since then I have been what Stephen King might call a faithful reader! I came across a book by Trappist monk Brother Paul Quenon - In Praise of the Useless Life, a copy of which I have yet failed to get my hands on! Would that we had more "useless" people in the world other than those engaged with the useful invention and production of weapons of destruction, with the extractive industries, with industries that destroy, pollute,...
For what it's worth (!) I wrote this little sonnet a while back which kind of addresses this subject:
Fireflies
We set these little boats aflame
And launch them into the darkness
Not knowing what becomes of them
Before they slip beneath the surface.
Their voyages are their own,
Their fates not our concern;
They sail for shores unknown
Lighting the darkness as the burn.
We must not ask too much
Nor try to stake some claim;
Who knows what lives they touch,
What hearts they set aflame?
And so, like fireflies in the night,
Let's set this darkness burning bright.
Best wishes for good health.
Donal O'Farrell