In his 1848 work Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill observed:

It is not good for a man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character: and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without.

That notion — of solitude “as essential to any depth of meditation or of character” — sounds weirdly, disturbingly, antique today. We can’t very well turn off our cell phones or keep our e-mails unanswered, can we? And what if we know nothing of the news of the day?

Still, the idea of solitude as an essential, humanizing trait is one that’s been honored, and reiterated, for centuries by the best and most influential minds of Civilization. It’s an idea come down to us through the humanities — art, history, literature, philosophy, religion — those disciplines which Mark Slouka panegyrized in last September’s Harper’s:

The humanities … teach us incrementally, endlessly, not what to do but how to be. …[They] are a superb delivery mechanism for what we might call democratic values.

OK, yet are we to count solitude as a “democratic value”? Yes indeed, for solitude is conducive to thought and introspection, and introspection conduces to empathy and education, and thus to George Washington’s ideal of an “enlightened” citizenry.

“Thought is neither instant nor noisy,” Wallace Stegner reminds us:

… It thrives best in solitude, in quiet, and in the company of the past, the great community of recorded human experience. That recorded experience is essential whether one hopes to reassert some aspect of it, or attack it.

Writing back in the 1500s, Michel De Montaigne assures us:

It is not good enough to have gotten away from the crowd, it is not enough to move; we must get away from the love of crowds that is within us, we must sequester ourselves and regain possession of ourselves. … That is what it is to choose wisely the treasures that can be secured from harm, and to hide them in a place where no one may go and which can be betrayed only by ourselves. … The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to ourselves.*

And Thoreau tells us in 1863:

When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. … Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself ,— an hypaethral [open to the sky] temple, consecrated to the service of the gods?… It is important to preserve the mind’s chastity. …I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.

And Nietzsche tells us in 1888:

Slow is the experience of all deep fountains: long have they to wait until they know what hath fallen into their depths. / Away from the marketplace and from fame taketh place all that is great: away from the marketplace and from fame have ever dwelt the devisers of new values. / Flee, my friend, into thy solitude…

By contrast to these enduring voices from Stegner’s “great community,” our present day culture of Reality TV and Social Media sends us the subtle but insidious messages that 1) being alone amounts to humiliation and inferiority, and 2) being unknown amounts to worthlessness and disgrace.

Writer Dave Eggers touched on this concept beautifully in his book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius:

We’ve grown up thinking of ourselves in relation to the political-media-entertainment ephemera, in our safe and comfortable homes … how we would fit into this or that band or TV show or movie, and how we would look doing it. [We] are people for whom the idea of anonymity is existentially irrational, indefensible.

“You are worthy or desirable,” declares the culture of today, “inasmuch as you can demonstrate acceptance by others via circuits and cables” (or in the case of reality TV, inasmuch as you remain in the group and avoid getting kicked off the show).

Similarly, we hear it declaimed: “You are valid, you are real, inasmuch as you publish evidence daily — even hourly (Twitter, anyone?) — of your existence, your validity.”

The unavoidable problem here, however, is that as much as we crave to avoid isolation and seek verification that we exist, the selves we wish verified are actually becoming less and less singular or unique, at least in the principle realm we use to verify them, the Internet.

Online we are more isolated than ever, but without the soul-shaping benefits of real aloneness. Why log on unless you hope to connect with somebody, or at any rate feel connected to the buzz of the day? Granted, the Web is more than minute-to-minute media (may we doff modesty a moment to take this blog as an example?), but you get my drift.

The Internet, by itself, also cannot provide us with real community. An e-mail is not a handshake. Nor are most Facebook friends likely to live close enough to keep an eye on your house while you’re away.

(Blogger’s note: Herewith, I face an incontrovertible irony — employing the Internet to outline the Internet’s dangers and deficiencies as today’s medium of choice. But hey, that the medium is good for some things can’t be denied. Onward, then.)

Online we live in the thick of one another’s quasi selves, what writer Neil Postman called “a neighborhood of strangers.” And however manifold are the “activities” we initiate or the information we access on the Internet, the medium demands that we stare at a screen, and therefore it cannot enable individuality. To the contrary, screen-time can only act as a force of psycho-physical leveling. To stare at a screen is, for everyone who does it, the same experience.

So, one cannot be beneficially alone on the Internet, and in a very real sense one cannot be wholly oneself, for individuality, personality, and independent thought are conditioned not by the acquisition of information or fiber optic “access” to others, but by varied experience (i.e. away from the terminal).

“The drift in the United States today is toward the submergence of the self into the Mass Mind,” writes Morris Berman in his book The Twilight of American Culture,

a trend that is powerfully encouraged by corporate culture and the new technology. Along with this — as in the early Middle Ages — we see the dissolution of interiority.

Berman’s pungent phrase “submergence of the self into the Mass Mind” inevitably conjures Aldous Huxley’s classic Brave New World (1932), which envisions a blissful and soulless future “paradise” expurgated of societal “ills” such as individuality, books, religion, marital life, and yes, personal solitude — all in the interest of industry (read: economic superiority), harmony (read: societal conformity and obedience), and ceaseless pleasure (read: distraction).

Huxley’s future world is no authoritarian dystopia. Rather, it’s a smoothly functioning society whose citizens, as far as they can imagine, couldn’t be happier or more productive. They are prosperous, well fed, pleasantly medicated, entertained, sexually promiscuous (it’s the norm, “everybody belongs to everybody else”), and desire nothing other than what’s offered to them by their station in the societal hierarchy. The key to their societal health and harmony is the eradication of individual desire through systematic “conditioning” begun at birth. A crucial component of this “conditioning” is an uninterrupted involvement in communal life, a forbiddance — and inculcated horror of — solitude

The following bit from the novel describes this culture of mass-identity.

The group was now complete, the solidarity circle perfect and without flaw. Man, woman, man, in a ring of endless alteration round the table. Twelve of them ready to be made one, to be fused, to lose their twelve separate identities in a larger being.

Now put them around the globe instead of around the table, make them a billion instead of twelve, and change “solidarity circle” to Internet. Creepy, for sure. Fortunately perhaps, the present climate of the Internet is much more fractious (at its best, articulate debate defines it) than Huxley’s gray-eyed group-think. But the point remains that we relinquish something quintessentially human in being constantly logged on, “accessible,” and vulnerable to the manipulation of our focus and the depletion of our attention-spans.

“Being online,” writes Sven Birkerts, “and having the subjective experience of depth, of existential coherence, are mutually exclusive situations.”

Meanwhile, the vocation of selfhood, the cultivation of personal, psychic, and spiritual independence, remains — and will remain, as ever — inescapably tied to solitude and its concomitants: privacy, slowness, inner quietude, and anonymity. All of which, of course, contradict our culture of connectivity and instantaneousness.

We modern mortals, like the generations before us, need to be re-set on a regular basis, reconditioned to the natural, non-mechanical pace of the world and of our own souls. Our age-old impulse toward meditation and prayer can itself reveal the intrinsic human impulse toward solitude.

Let the world’s course be what it may, you will always find a physician and helper, a new energy and future within yourself, in your poor, ill-used, tractable, indestructible soul.—Hermann Hesse (1917)**

Next week I’ll conclude this Defense with Part Two. Right now, I’m powering off in pursuit of solitude.

*Montaigne translation by Donald M. Frame, Selected Essays of Michel De Montaigne, Walter J. Black, NY, 1943.

**Hesse translation by Denver Lindley, My Belief: Essays on Life and Art by Hermann Hesse, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 1974.

(This post comes from the Soul Shelter archives)

You may also enjoy:

“Is the Internet Dangerous?”

“To Recharge, Unplug”

“A Song for the Unsung”

“Presenting … the Intravidual”

“When Connectivity Breeds Loneliness”

“Hazards of Career, Rewards of Vocation”

“On Slowness”

“Soul School”

“In Defense of ‘Aimless’ Learning”

Before we cue Taps, let’s all step away from the media juggernaut, take a deep breath of reason, and recall a few (just a few!) of the attributes, consistently neglected in the now-daily hubbub, that continue to make the old-fashioned book not only a viable technology, but, well, a profoundly wonderful one we really don’t want to lose.

1 . The book unites delivery device and content. E-readers, drained of battery power, revert to hunks of plastic.

2. The book begets libraries and independent bookstores, irreplaceable bastions of culture and community.

3. The book, beyond cover price, comes with no proprietary fee. Your preferred e-reader sets you back $250 to $500.

4. The book is not an inventory portal, therefore not subject to proprietary restrictions in content; i.e.: Due to licensing or discretionary considerations, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley cannot be downloaded to this e-reading device. (Think this is a joke? See note* below.)

5. The book is not a brand, therefore free from functional limitations imposed by a manufacturer; i.e.: The e-book you’re requesting is not supported by your e-reader’s operating system. Upgrade to our newest e-reader or follow this link to our checkout to download OS-2011.5.

6. The book withstands excessive dust, direct sunlight, splashed soup, or dropped potatoes.

7. The book is hard to eradicate except by fire. Is any e-reading device likely to reach — with zero loss of content — an age comparable to civilization’s oldest incunabula?

8. The book, presented as gift, shows regard for the recipient’s tastes, being a single selection and/or bearing the giver’s handwritten inscription.

9. The book can be autographed by its author.

10. The book, by conspicuous display of title and/or author, occasions conversation between mutually inclined strangers.

11. The book may be safely read in the bath.

12. The book relieves you of the screen in an age of relentless screen-media assaults upon the eye.

13. The book is not an immediate access point for innumerable diversions (e-mail, video games, etc.).

14. The book’s printed editions are traceably distinct, a defense against manipulations of fact or history.

15. The book does not “transmit and receive,” except in mysterious ways. No need to fear an Orwellian eye embedded in the page.

16. The book cannot be “swiped remotely” by the powers that be.

17. The book’s publisher may go broke without imperiling access to additional content.

18. The book, bought second-hand or borrowed, yields up fascinating ephemera: grocery lists, love notes, locks of hair, receipts, etc., bringing the reader into poignant contact with an unknown fellow human being.

19. The book complements your mantelpiece.

20. The book boasts many practical uses beyond communication (as furniture, makeshift stairs, etc.). E-readers — oddly shaped and breakable — are as obsolescent as other computer junk once they quit working.

21. The book is not invariably manufactured in China.

22. The book accommodates ingenuity of format: children’s books, art books, illuminated texts, pop-up books, fold-out maps, etc.

23. The book makes a meaningful heirloom.

24. The book may be safely left unattended on the beach. As gizmo it is not a hot steal.

25. The book is not a shopping cart.

*“Last week…the creators of a Web comic version of the classic novel, called “Ulysses Seen,” said that Apple required them to remove any images containing nudity before the comic was approved as an application for the iPad.” –New York Times, June 13, 2010

UPDATE: June 16, 2010 — Apple recants. Still, a defender of literature this does not make.

You may also enjoy:

You Are Not a Gadget

In Defense of Solitude

Presenting…The Intravidual

One Way to Protect Your Soul in a Wired Age

How Reading Can Keep Us Safe

Accepting a Digitized World

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield dispenses no-nonsense, read-it-in-a-day advice for anybody striving to channel their creative juices into a floodtide of productivity. In brief, snappy chapters titled clearly for easy reference, Pressfield calls it like he sees it:

Most of us have two lives. The life we live and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

“Resistance” becomes Pressfield’s keynote. You’ll get his drift if you’ve ever wished to finish a creative project (or start one, for that matter) only to succumb to procrastination and self-inflicted guilt. Resistance is the nattering, excuse-making voice in our heads that keeps us from quieting down, focusing, and getting to work.

Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. …To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be. If you believe in God (and I do) you must declare Resistance evil, for it prevents us from achieving the life God intended when He endowed each of us with our own unique genius.

Here lies my one significant quibble with Pressfield’s book. I find his terms, though helpful in a wake-up-call kind of way, to be a bit extreme.

For isn’t Resistance sort of … necessary to creativity? Rather than seeking to wholly suppress and kill Resistance, isn’t the artist’s task to tame it and train it to one’s service? (“Resistance sparks the flame,” goes the old adage.)

For me, the edict “You must declare Resistance evil” sets up a false duality that seems a little Manichean. I personally favor John Dewey’s more nuanced outlook on the very same subject (Resistance and the Artist) in his 1933 book Art As Experience:

Since the artist cares in a peculiar way for the phase of experience in which union is achieved, he does not shun moments of resistance and tension. He rather cultivates them, not for their own sake but because of their potentialities, bringing to living consciousness an experience that is unified and total. … The moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of intensest life.

In other words, without Resistance, how could we know artistic success?

Nevertheless Pressfield’s central point is sound. “It’s not the writing part that’s hard,” he observes, “What’s hard is sitting down to write.” And the perspectives of The War of Art are frequently salutary. For instance, I love this bit:

As artists and professionals it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls. In this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture. We overthrow the programming of advertising, movies, video games, magazines, TV, and MTV by which we have been hypnotized from the cradle. We unplug ourselves from the grid by recognizing that we will never cure our restlessness by contributing our disposable income to the bottom line of Bullshit, Inc., but only by doing our work.

The War of Art gets somewhat New Agey for my tastes toward its close, but it nevertheless serves like all good books of the “Inspiration” genre to affirm creative expression.

Creative work is not a selfish act nor a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.

That is a message of inestimable value to artists striving in a culture that all too often instills shame in answer to creative enterprise. Even those entities that ostensibly nurture the fledgling artist (e.g., university MFA-programs) can be tacit accomplices in this shame game, for they inadvertently suggest that only a degree, or firm “career track,” can dignify the artistic attempt.

Iconoclastic playwright David Mamet, in his wonderful 1997 book True & False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor, excoriates such sham authority, and extols artistic self-reliance. (True & False is a resource of wisdom and solace for any kind of artist, actor or not.)

It is not childish to live with uncertainty, to devote oneself to craft rather than a career, to an idea rather than an institution. It’s courageous and requires a courage of the order that the institutionally co-opted are ill-equipped to perceive. They are so unequipped to perceive it that they can only call it childish, and so excuse their exploitation of you.

If the value in The War of Art is how it galvanizes the artist to get working and keep at it, the value of True & False lies in its authoritative philosophy about the creative life. Mamet continually vindicates the artist in his or her headlong impracticality. I’ll leave you with the following passage which does just that.

Read Pressfield and Mamet and be inspired. Work and be well.

The best advice one can give an aspiring artist is ‘Have something to fall back on.’ The merit of the instruction is this: those who adopt it spare themselves the rigor of the artistic life. … Those with ‘something to fall back on’ invariably fall back on it. They intended to all along. That is why they provided themselves with it. But those with no alternative see the world differently. The old story has the mother say to the sea captain, ‘Take special care of my son, he cannot swim,’ to which the captain responds, ‘Well, then, he’d better stay in the boat.’ … Those of you with nothing to fall back on, you will find, are home.

(Thanks to Chris at the The Art of Non-Conformity for alerting me to Pressfield’s book)

(This post comes to you from the Soul Shelter archives)

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“Knuckling Down to the Hard Work of Writing”

“You’ve Got to Jump”

“Opting Out of the Deferred Life Plan”

“Born Ready”

“A Song for the Unsung”

“You Don’t Have to Be an Insider“

I’m closing in on the completion of my new manuscript. I mean it this time.

Those who know me know I’ve been saying this regularly for the last year, as my personal “deadlines” keep retreating by weeks, months, seasons. The fiction-writing process is so inherently anti-efficient, so non-streamlined, based so much on necessary detours, excavations, mysterious distractions (“What’s this secondary character’s back-story? His upbringing? Romantic disappointments? Obsessions and hang-ups? What does he like to eat for supper?”) that a self-imposed deadline is, more often than not, just a helpful illusion. Almost there, almost there … but wait, what’s the rush? Why not push the finish line back a bit and take some time to flesh out this sub-plot.

There are, of course, other reasons for a rubbery deadline. Daily life tempts, absorbs, distracts — sometimes disrupts. For instance, you happen to spend three months battling a sinus infection, as I did this winter, or you happen to have back problems, or you can’t shake those migraines, or you’ve got loved ones in town and would rather rack up on quality time than word count, or your household appliances stage a revolt and begin leaking, smoking, screeching, or kicking the bucket one by one. As distractions go I have not been undersupplied this past year. I’ve enjoyed the blessed kind (visitors), and cursed the perplexing (appliances).

And yet returning to my work, as I somehow manage to do for hours upon hours each week (thanks to late nights and sacrificial weekends), I’m conscious of a steady, if glacial, progress. Pages accumulate. Plot tightens. Lines grow leaner, tauter. Characters walk and breathe. It’s sort of mysterious, almost inexplicable. After many a frantic day spent fretting about receding personal deadlines and all the work I am not managing to do, I come back to the desk to find an ever thickening stack of pages, an ever stronger book.

Going Strong While Getting By is how I’ve come to think of it. It’s a time-honored tradition among novelists, if not among artists in general. Somehow, somehow, patiently abiding interruptions while remaining intent on the continuing imaginative process, you make headway.

It made me smile today to come across this snippet in The Journal of Jules Renard, penned in 1889:

I can’t get around this dilemma: I have a horror of troubles, but they whip me up, they make me talented. Peace and well-being, on the contrary, paralyze me. Either be a nobody, or everlastingly plagued. I must make a choice. I prefer to be plagued. I am stating it. I’ll be properly annoyed when I am taken at my word.

Renard was rather more declarative on the subject than I care to be, but his words strike a chord.

Last month the bank account was overdrawn. The kitchen window-pane has been broken for nine months (yes, nine; thank God for storm windows). The car steering makes a noise. One headlight is out. There are bees in the wall of my writing room. My toddler has a runny nose and has cut the length of his naps in half. The lawn is shin-high. At the flip of a switch the other night, three overhead lights made a zapping sound and went black (not a fuse issue –  something in the wiring, as I learned by shocking myself at the fuse box during a bumbling troubleshoot). And, oh yes, I’m a day late writing this post.

But I’m not complaining. I’m getting by, I’m also going strong. Here’s to making the best of  it, and seeing that it brings out the best in me.

You may also enjoy:

Roadblocks, Restrictions, and Other Helpful Things

John Dewey: What Resists Us Helps Us

Two Books to Encourage & Console Creatives

Daunting Task? Learn to Whip It!

In the Absence of “Yes”

Here’s an egregious adaptation of some famous words by William Carlos Williams:

It is difficult to get current events, wealth or social standing from the arts, but people die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

Author Bill Ivey would agree, as attested in his stirring book, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights.

Ivey, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, is convinced that America’s collective appreciation for — and cultivation of — art and culture is withering in a social climate where the mentality of big business reigns and a mania for the bottom line severely impoverishes the cultural lives of Americans.

Not only is our intake of art reduced to “product” that best “performs” — i.e., conforms to market analyses — but since the early twentieth-century our nation’s artistic heritage (in other words, private art-making passed down through tradition) has been increasingly threatened, a result of America’s steady development into an almost strictly consumer culture (recall that our recessional woes owe much to our 70 percent consumer-driven economy). Ivey writes:

By the 1920s new arts companies offering new arts products were converting engagement in art into an act of consumption. The notion of participation was reshaped — its sense of doing replaced by passive activities like purchasing a recording or attending a concert or exhibition. … The commoditization of emerging art forms pumped up the taking in (consumption) at the expense of making art.

As revealed by the virtually unrestrained media conglomeration and rise of big-box retailers over the last quarter-century or so (witness your neighborhood’s own Wal-Marts, Targets, and Best Buys), this culture of consumption-over-creation has only gotten worse. Which means, says Ivey, that we are all being cheated out of something that ought to be endemic to any thriving culture built upon democratic, pluralistic values, namely: our “expressive life.”

The term is Ivey’s coinage, and refers to “a reservoir of identity and spiritual renewal powerful enough to replace the fading allure of empty consumerism.”

Today this Expressive Life is rarely attributed the importance it deserves, but is nevertheless a vital-sign of culture and societal health, or as Ivey puts it:

A realm of being and behavior that …can be as distinct as ‘family life’ or ‘work life.’ …[It is] something akin to tradition, a place where community heritage interacts with individual creativity, maintaining the past while letting in the new.

Who is working effectively to repair our diminished Expressive Life?

Ivey pleads passionately for Americans to take the pulse of their nation’s cultural wellbeing and see if we don’t need a new cultural fitness program. Not only is personal art-making at risk in a society where the marketplace rules all, but professional art-making is in distress, thanks in no small part to bottom-line thinking, as well as to the predominance of “intellectual property” and broad expansions in restrictive copyright:

By failing to link our expressive life to America’s public purpose, we have placed our nation’s heart and soul at risk. We are forcing our great artists to navigate a complex and discouraging marketplace in order to survive. We have converted the shared memory embedded in our priceless cultural heritage into mere ‘intellectual property,’ which is bought, sold, abandoned, or simply locked away in the vaults of giant media companies.

For the record, Ivey’s subtitle, How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights, dangles unfittingly; better if it continued: … And What We Can Do About It, for he offers a range of fresh policy ideas, all of which gravitate around his astonishing central premise that America ought to adopt a “Cultural Bill of Rights” and establish an office of cultural affairs dedicated to the protection of those rights.

Arts, Inc. even includes Ivey’s prototype for just such a document (which, it should be noted, would advocate not for the rights of any one artistic community, but for artistic culture in the broadest sense):

The right to explore [the arts of]…both our nation’s collective experience and our individual and community traditions.

It’s wonderfully fresh thinking — and makes for an affirming read. Surely we’d all agree that more art for everybody can only be a cultural positive. (Writer D.K. Row hints as much in this fine Oregonian article in support of gallery-going in hard economic times).

But … there’s a frightful prospect that inevitably accompanies any vision of legislative cultural advocacy like Ivey’s, and that is a government empowered to tell us what art is, how it should sound, what it should show, etc. Censorship, and all the gray areas that come with it, is the big ugly genie in the bottle here.

Or … maybe not. Ivey (who, by the way, was an advisor on President Obama’s transition team) compellingly demonstrates that de facto government censorship is already with us, through heavy fines levied by the Federal Communications Commission.

We must lay our fears of a new McCarthyism to rest, says Ivey, if we are to counterbalance the prevalence of corporate mindset in our arts system.

One example of that prevalence (not mentioned in Ivey’s book): Ever heard of BookScan? It’s a point-of-sale technology used by mega-bookstores (nefariously) to track the sales history of authors — and to excise store inventories of those writers whose “product” fails to “move.” This means that if your last book sold less than 20,000 copies you’re likely to miss your shot at shelf space in such a store — that is, unless your publisher coughs up the fee for a special co-op display. “Who can argue with that?” say BookScan apologists. “Sales figures don’t lie.” And so the gatekeepers of the present cultural system (read: market executives) keep on looking for the next sure “big thing.”

Until we articulate our cultural rights and take measures to protect them, such cash-cow worship will continue unfettered, and will further narrow what cultural offerings come readily available to the public.

Likewise, private ownership of our cultural heritage will only grow broader. (Did you know that the monolithic firm CORBIS owns the famous photograph of JFK Jr. standing in short-pants and saluting his father’s coffin? Thought that image was a part of every American’s heritage? Actually, it’s “intellectual property.” Happen to be a teacher and want to use it in a history lesson? Fine, but it’ll cost you.)

Where, in such a system, do we see the artists and cultural advocates having their say? Federal entities like the NEA, says Ivey, are well-meaning but politicized to the point of dysfunction. Lacking a central and binding proclamation of cultural rights, such organizations inevitably get bogged down in petty congressional partisanship. The public non-profits sector, on the other hand, is in a shambles and has succeeded in little more than polarizing culture by class: expensive highbrow versus popular lowbrow. (Maybe Creative Commons, for one, is a start.)

But what we need is an organized office working in service to our fully articulated rights to cultural wellbeing.

Ivey asks the right question:

How could a department of cultural affairs possibly generate a cultural system less functional, less attuned to public purposes, than the one we’ve been handed by a century of marketplace arrogance and government indifference?

Are you ready to claim your Expressive Life and stand up for your cultural rights? Read Arts, Inc. and decide.

* * *

A society that does not labor to be beautiful becomes indifferent to smog, litter, what Henry James called ‘trash triumphant,’ lurid communications, wretched TV, billboards, strip malls, blatancies of noise and confusion — or it considers these things the price you have to pay to make more money. — Denis Donaghue

(This post appears from the Soul Shelter archives)

You might also enjoy:

“Are You an Amateur? Why Not?”

“You Are Not a Gadget”

“Nourishing the Creative Impulse”

“Is the Internet Dangerous?”

“The Ground Underfoot: Why Stories Matter”

“What We Really Need to Be Happy”

“On Pilgrimage: The Ghosts Who Are My Teachers“

One of the most enjoyable parts of posting on Soul Shelter every week is the opportunity it presents to share the books and voices that mean the most to me. In that vein, today I recommend five books certain to stir and fortify the soul of any reader.

1. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis (1952)

Greek writer Kazantzakis’ classic novel recounts an unlikely friendship. Zorba is a sensualist and libertine who finds his every joy in earthly pleasures, and his friend “The Boss” is an intellectual, monkish type inclined to seek spiritual fulfillment through renunciation and detachment. Their colorful adventures on the island of Crete are an ongoing dialogue between body and soul, spirit and flesh, earth and stars. An unforgettable book.

I looked at Zorba in the light of the moon and admired the jauntiness and simplicity with which he adapted himself to the world around him, the way his body and soul formed one harmonious whole, and all things — women, bread, water, meat, sleep — blended happily with his flesh and became Zorba. I had never seen such a friendly accord between a man and the universe.

2. The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck (1961)

Steinbeck is an immensely powerful writer celebrated primarily for The Grapes of Wrath, a fine book in some ways, but not his best by any stretch of the imagination. The Winter of Our Discontent, one of Steinbeck’s last novels, is often overlooked, although a year after its publication the author won the Nobel Prize in literature. Of the numerous Steinbeck titles I’ve read, this one rises to the top whenever I think of his work. It’s a gripping story about a hardworking grocery clerk who comes perilously close to (in the words of the first edition jacket flap) “tak[ing] a holiday from his own scrupulous standards…trad[ing], temporarily, as he thinks, ‘a habit of conduct’ for ‘a cushion of security.’ “ The novel explores “some of our shoddy [American] attitudes toward honesty and success … the loss of integrity in our world — the decline in our standards of personal, business, and political morality.” Given the recent breakdowns on Wall Street, these themes resound with uncanny relevance today, but Steinbeck’s dénouement here is affecting and redemptive. Here’s the author’s own brief preface to the novel:

Readers seeking to identify the fictional people and places here described would do better to inspect their own communities and search their own hearts, for this book is about a large part of America today.

He meant America of 1961, but his words could just as well apply to America of 2010.

3. Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner (1987)

Another somewhat overlooked novel by a celebrated author, Crossing to Safety is a beautifully intimate story about friendship, family life, ambition, and the ways our well-laid plans go sometimes aright and sometimes awry. Stegner explores the fifty-year friendship between two couples, the Morgans and the Langs, whose lives run parallel at points and at other points sharply diverge. Studded with deep, witty reflections on the most important matters in life — faithful friendship, work/life balance, sacrifice, aspiration, strength and loyalty in times of hardship — it’s one of the most moving novels I’ve ever read. Here’s the narrator, Larry Morgan, recalling his early days of overachievement:

Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim’s Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn an man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else — pathway to the stars, maybe.

4. Emperor of the Air, Stories by Ethan Canin (1988)

Ethan Canin published this riveting short story collection, his debut, at age 28 while simultaneously maintaining a medical school career. Twenty years later, Emperor of the Air endures as a contemporary classic. The jacket flap aptly remarks that Canin’s stories explore “the beauty and mystery in everyday existence: that rare knowledge, denied or pursued, that illuminates the soul … the startling moments when life opens up and presents itself to us.” That’s about as accurate a description of the book as I can imagine. Here’s a little sampling, one of many beautiful moments that permeate the book. It’s from the title story, whose narrator is an aging high school science teacher.

What would be left of the earth in a century? I didn’t think I was a sentimental man, and I don’t weep at plays or movies, but certain moments have always been peculiarly moving for me, and the mention of a century was one. There have been others. Standing out of the way on a fall evening, as couples and families converge on the concert hall from the radiating footpaths, has always filled me with a longing, though I don’t know for what. I have taught the life of the simple hydra that is drawn, for no reasons it could ever understand, toward the bright surface of the water, and the spectacle of a thousand human beings organizing themselves into a single room to hear the quartets of Beethoven is as moving to me as birth or death. I feel the same way during the passage of an automobile across a cantilever span above the Mississippi, mother of rivers. These moments overwhelm me…

5. Meditations from a Moveable Chair by Andre Dubus (1998)

On a July night in 1986 the writer Andre Dubus saw two cars stalled on I-93 north of Boston and stopped to see if he could help. While standing at the roadside he was struck by a car and lost one leg and the use of the other. A former Marine and long-distance runner, Dubus was a Zorba-like personality who’d always nurtured a powerful relationship with his own physical self. After that fateful night, he found himself confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Meditations from a Moveable Chair collects 25 Dubus essays, long and short, on the subject of the human soul, and the ways in which Dubus “finally, found joy in the sacramental magic of even the most quotidian tasks.” A devout — but by no means orthodox -- Catholic, Dubus writes very openly about matters of faith. Here’s a bit from his essay, “Sacraments”:

Between isolation and harmony, there is not always a vast distance. Sometimes it is a distance that can be traversed in a moment, by choosing to focus on the essence of what is occurring, rather than on its exterior: its difficulty or beauty, its demands or joy, peace or grief, passion or humor. This is not a matter of courage or discipline or will; it is a receptive condition.

There you have ‘em. Read well, be well.

(This post appears courtesy of the Soul Shelter archives)

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As an Internet and Virtual Reality trailblazer, Jaron Lanier helped to change the world as we know it. Now he wants to do it again, only this time by advocating for reform of the online culture he in part created.

In his book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, published last month, Lanier gives an impassioned call for a renewed Internet characterized by technological humanism, intellectual modesty on the part of technologists, and civility of discourse by all who log on. In other words, in his view the Web ought to be about—and its designs ought to encourage and empower:

• Individuals rather than ads;
• Decorum and exchange rather than mean-spiritedness and polarization;
• Unique, idiosyncratic voices rather than an anonymous hive;
• Original creative expression rather than rehashes and mashups (what Lanier calls “Second-order expression”);
• Artistic entrepreneurship rather than the Web-giveaways of thought, labor, and creativity now expected in our “crowd-sourced” world.

Where the trendsetters of today’s Internet (“Web 2.0”) extol its liberating, ultra-democratic spirit, pointing to Social Media (Facebook, etc.) and Open Culture (Wikipedia, etc.), Lanier fears an Internet that institutionalizes bad Web design and a Web-mentality that celebrates constrictive, data-centric technology over infinite human creativity, and does so largely because that technology serves advertising and thus enriches data-gatherers and “cloud-lords” (those few technologists who’ve cornered the market on connecting the crowds).

Writes Lanier:

The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.

That’s Lanier’s sharp left hook to the jaw of “cybernetic totalism,” the predominant religion of Silicon Valley. Cybernetic totalists believe in “the noosphere … a collective consciousness [that] emerges from all the users on the Web,” and also in “The Singularity,” a kind of techno-Rapture which involves “people dying in the flesh and being uploaded into a computer and remaining conscious.”

No kidding.

The cybernetic totalists live to serve their faith by implementing Web designs that nourish the crowd, the “digital cloud,” a super-consciousness before which the point of view of the individual human ceases to matter. The Cloud, at any given moment, knows all that mankind can ever know. The implications of such beliefs are vast. It follows, for instance, that instead of books, we will have one global book authored by this electronic super-consciousness (i.e. by everybody and thus…nobody).

Sound a little bit like technological fascism? Alas, how blurry grows the line between creative/social idealism and destructive folly!

A half century ago Aldous Huxley wrote the following in Brave New World Revisited. In light of the ascendant culture criticized in You Are Not a Gadget, do you find Huxley’s words as chilling as I do?

A new Social Ethic is replacing our traditional ethic system—the system in which the individual is primary. The key words in this Social Ethic are ‘adjustment,’ ‘adaptation,’ socially oriented behavior,’ ‘belongingness,’ ‘acquisition of social skills,’ ‘team work,’ ‘group living,’ ‘group loyalty,’ ‘group dynamics,’ ‘group thinking,’ ‘group creativity.’ Its basic assumption is that the social whole has greater worth and significance than its individual parts. … However hard they try, men cannot create a social organism, they can only create an organization. In the process of trying to create an organism they will merely create a totalitarian despotism.

In the dominant ideology now shaping the Internet, the Cloud is all. And the Cloud, specifically, is the Crowd.

Lanier argues that current software designs (“Twitter’s adoration of fragments ; Facebook…organizing people into multiple-choice identities; Wikipedia eras[ing] point of view entirely”) implicitly encourage us to depersonalize ourselves, to reduce to base technological definitions important human things like friendship, individual expression, and personal attributes. We’re each coaxed to become but a facet of the Crowd, to dissolve into digital ether, no longer characterized, no longer really human, but wholly Cloud. “Authorship…is not a priority of the new ideology,” hence: “the digital flattening of expression into a global mush.”

Lanier revolts:

It is true that by using [online] tools individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. …The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting. Some believe it will be better; others, including me, believe it will be disastrously worse.

And here, knowingly or not, he goes on to echo Huxley:

Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available.

The medium is the message, indeed. In a modern world that lives by and worships technology, one ideology or another will prove a force we can’t ignore. So it turns out that questions as seemingly arcane as online design bear strongly on the universal matters of freedom, democracy, cultural well-being, and spiritual health.

As the great cultural critic Neil Postman asked,

Can a nation preserve its history, originality, and humanity by submitting itself totally to the sovereignty of a technological thought-world?

Lanier, who in many ways fits Postman’s description of a technological “resistance fighter,” explores those big societal questions throughout his book, and outlines the dispiriting new economic order resulting from Web 2.0: a broad disenfranchisement of artists and creative entrepreneurs; i.e. of culturally enriching creative expression.

If some free video of a silly stunt will draw as many eyeballs as the product of a professional filmmaker on a given day, then why pay the filmmaker? If an algorithm can use cloud-based data to unite those eyeballs with the video clip of the moment, why pay editors or impresarios?

Specifically, Lanier sees an emergent generation of unpaid “digital peasants,” those who labor and think in service to the so-called “noosphere,” even while disempowered—and largely dehumanized—by the decisions of digital lords, rulers of the Cloud. His outrage is heartening:

It is utterly strange to hear my many old friends in the world of digital culture claim to be the true sons of the Renaissance without realizing that using computers to reduce individual expression is a primitive, retrograde activity, no matter how sophisticated your tools are.

Personally I part company with Lanier toward his conclusion, where his techie fervor stirs him to swooning descriptions of the ultimate entertainment: computerized alternate worlds, immersive virtual realms yet to be realized. Admittedly, Virtual Reality can serve us in obviously constructive ways, for example its use in surgical procedures, but Lanier’s boosterism of the technology for its own sake seems to contradict the general spirit of his book at its close.

Still, You Are Not A Gadget is a brilliant, almost mind-altering read. Though Lanier’s aim may be manifesto, his tone is winningly conversational throughout. We hear the voice of an aggrieved forefather pleading for reason, technological temperance, and good old humanism amid an accelerating technocracy. And he’s not short on constructive ideas, both macro and micro, assuring us there’s still hope for a positive Web renewal because the design mentalities driving Web 2.0 are not yet incontrovertibly locked-in, not quite. The way of the “noosphere” needn’t necessarily be our future.

But how is the average non-techie Internet user to help shift the cultural tide?

There are things you can do to be a person instead of a source of fragments to be exploited by others …

—and proposed within an encouraging list of creative ideas, Lanier offers this antidote to the fetish of fragments and bits (it’s representative of the book’s constructive spirit):

Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.

With Soul Shelter’s modus operandi so nicely endorsed, how could we fail to sing the praises of this timely manifesto?

(Read Lanier’s recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal)

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Why It’s Desirable to Be Eccentric

John Ruskin on Soulful Imperfection

Throughout the whole second half of the nineteenth century “to read [John] Ruskin was accepted as proof of the possession of a soul.” So the great art historian Kenneth Clark once put it.

Ranking high among the eminent figures of the Victorian age, Ruskin was a man of many passions: poet, artist, critic, teacher, social reformer, and early conservationist. He stood staunchly against the dehumanizing effects of England’s Industrial Revolution, defending the human dignity of the laborer and celebrating the “nobility” of “unrefined” objects manufactured by the skill of humans rather than machines. These man-made objects, he insisted, “bring out the whole mind” and “the finer nature” of the laborer. In contrast was the machine-made product, which asked nothing of the workman’s soul but that he subordinate himself to the laws of the assembly line—hence: ugly, soulless, mass-produced items, and human workers degraded to automatons.

To Ruskin, labor and art need not be polarized as the ethos of the modern factory would have it. Rather, labor should be more than a matter of economy, and art more than a matter of taste. Both should coalesce in expression of the vitality, inventiveness, heart, thought, and spirit of humanity. How’s that for big dreaming?

Actually, given Ruskin’s powers of eloquence, it all amounted to far more than mere fancy. Thanks in no small part to his preachments, the dynamic Arts & Crafts movements emerged in England and America, mini-Renaissances of a kind. And as Kenneth Clark notes,

The influence of Ruskin’s ideas on social reform has been immense. Most of the changes which he advocated—free schools, free libraries, town planning, smokeless zones, green belts—are now taken for granted. … Today his thoughts influence the lives of millions.”

(Among Ruskin’s latter day admirers was Mahatma Ghandi, who professed a huge debt to the Victorian’s influence.)

A society expresses itself and its values in what it produces, most notably in its architecture and spirit of design. As Joseph Campbell observed,

You can tell what’s informing a society by what the tallest building is. When you approach a medieval town, the cathedral is the tallest thing in the place. When you approach an eighteenth-century town, it is the political palace … And when you approach a modern city, the tallest places are the office buildings, the centers of economic life.”

Ruskin’s writing is at its most vibrant when he gets going on this inseparability of what we are from what we make.

“You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both,” he writes in The Stones of Venice (1853).

We’re in prime Soul Shelter territory here.

Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must go to the accomplishment of the mean act. The eye of the soul must be bent upon the finger-point, and the soul’s force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last—a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in the world is concerned. …

On the other hand, if you will make a man of the living creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dullness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him. And whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be transfiguration behind and within them. …”

I love Ruskin’s whole-hearted embrace of imperfectibility here. It is not efficiency nor “engine-turned precision,” nor speed nor unerring calculation that characterizes a human soul, but “roughness,” “dullness,” “pause after pause.” Humans are a motley bunch. We resist programming. And these traits go hand-in-hand with human “majesty.”

Now there’s some food for thought in our present digital age, which would have us prize the smooth and smoothly functional, the shiny, the “hi-res,” and the lightning-quick—capacities all patently unhuman.

Go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children.

Ruskin’s main subject here—the European gothic age—occasions his commentary upon the industrialized Victorian world around him. In the best gothic cathedrals he sees an age that values, in ways both broadly cultural and personal, individual creativity, eccentricity, and craftsmanship.

The laborer is an artist and the artist a laborer. Labor and art are both desired by society—man and man’s spirit, vision and product.

For contrast Ruskin levels his gaze on a contemporary England where ignoble labor systems suppress the human spirit, drain the dignity from work, and breed unnecessary shame and shallow desires in the exhausted worker:

… It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means to pleasure. It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labor to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men. …This, nature bade not,—this, God blesses not,—this, humanity for no long time is able to endure.

We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labor; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labor that is divided; but the men:—Divided into mere segments of men—broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. …

…We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising, his brother; and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers and miserable workers. Now it is only by labor that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labor can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.

Ruskin wants the best and most vibrant part of a person to find natural expression in that person’s work. Consequently the work itself may be said to live, and in turn the work gives life to the worker—life, that is, in a form more significant than mere money for house and bread.

Returning to the subject of imperfectibility, Ruskin drives home with a poet’s persuasiveness the rightness, the needfulness, of the human imprint in whatever a human makes.

It is in laying the handprint of our soul upon things that we stay fully human and fully alive. If misguided ideals of progress, efficiency, profit, or perfectibility lead us to wipe this handprint clear, or to cherish whatever is sleek, robotic, and notably inhuman as the final aim of all our enterprise, we are in danger of giving up the nobler expressions of the human spirit, and thus endangering our souls.

…No good work whatever can be perfect. …[for] no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure: that is to say, his mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution, and the latter will now and then give way in trying to follow it. …

Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. …In all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.”

It is the soul’s business to strive toward expression, and maybe the soul’s greatest expression comes through imperfection nobly embraced, and through valuing in others what is imperfectly beautiful, what is beautifully imperfect—in a word, what is human.

(Ruskin’s “The Nature of Gothic” in its entirety is published in this book. )

This post is an installment of CommonSensical.

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The much-anticipated film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Road, has recently hit theaters (but by all means, read it before you see it!).

The Road’s 76-year-old author is a fascinating example of one to whom worldly success and renown have come very late, yet whose career has been marked by consistent excellence, and–apparently–consistent personal fulfillment. Never once in the course of his life as an author has McCarthy sought public attention. The work itself–of writing and publishing–seems to have remained reward enough for him.

McCarthy has been publishing books since 1965 (The Road is his tenth). For nearly thirty years he labored in obscurity, publishing five magnificent novels, none of which sold more than 2,500 copies, though all were critically acclaimed, and one, Blood Meridian (1985), would eventually be named by Time Magazine in a list of the ‘Top 100 Books of All Time.’

It was McCarthy’s sixth book, All the Pretty Horses (1992), that finally brought him a deservedly wide audience (though still McCarthy avoided the limelight, remaining his quiet, hardworking self). Two years back, his ninth novel, No Country for Old Men, was brought to the screen by filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen. The film netted a heap of Oscar honors.

A famously private person, McCarthy granted his first television interview in June of 2007 to Oprah Winfrey, who selected The Road for her TV book club. During the discussion the author made a number of fascinating statements on the subjects of following one’s passion, pursuing excellence, avoiding employment, enduring poverty, living and working with dedication, and having the faith to let go of material concerns.

In my own experience as a writer, I’ve never faced the kind of material squalor that McCarthy did in his earlier years, but though his lifestyle offers an extreme example of sacrifice, I find a great deal of wisdom in his words. As I see it, something beautiful comes through in McCarthy’s account of a life lived in total, humble dedication to his artistic pursuit–and the mysterious blessings that came of that dedication.

-McCarthy: …You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve … this interior image that is something that’s absolutely perfect, and that’s your signpost and your guide. You’ll never get there, but without it, you’ll never get anywhere …. You always have that hope that today I’m going to do something better than I’ve ever done [laughs] … How’s that for hubris?

-Oprah: …You were so poor at times, there was absolutely no money. And people would call and say, ‘Come and speak to us, we’ll pay you two thousand dollars’ or whatever, and you’d say, ‘No, everything I know is already on the page.’

-McCarthy: Well, I was busy. I had other things to do.

-Oprah: Are you just not interested in material [things]?

-McCarthy: I’m really not. I mean, it’s not that I don’t like things. Some things are really nice, but they certainly take a distant second place to being able to live your life and do what you want to do. And I always knew that I didn’t want to work.

-Oprah: How did you manage that? Most people want to know how to do that.

-McCarthy: Well, you have to be dedicated. But it was my Number One priority.

-Oprah: That you didn’t want to have a nine-to-five job?

-McCarthy: Yeah. I thought, ‘You’re just here once, life is brief, and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.’ And I don’t have any advice for anybody on how to go about that, except that if you’re really dedicated you can probably do it.

-Oprah: So you worked at not working.

-McCarthy: Absolutely. Yeah, it was the Number One priority.

-Oprah: Was it true you were so poor you got put out of a $40 a month hotel or someplace?

-McCarthy: I did.

-Oprah: [Laughs] That is poor.

-McCarthy: It was in New Orleans, it was a little room … I was very naive….

-Oprah: And wasn’t there another time that you were so poor you didn’t even have toothpaste?

-McCarthy: Yeah, I was living in a shack in Tennessee, and I ran out of toothpaste, and I went down to the mailbox one morning to see if there might be anything there, and in the mailbox there was a tube of toothpaste.

-Oprah: A free sample?

-McCarthy: Yeah, a free sample. But my life, you know, there’s hundreds of anecdotes like that. That’s the way my life has been. Just when things were really, really bleak, something would happen.

I love this notion. McCarthy’s personal story seems to suggest that once he’d devoted himself wholly to the enterprise of writing, and made the material sacrifices necessary to allow him to do excellent work, he created circumstances in which other concerns took care of themselves–not because he was favored by some quasi-supernatural agency, but because he stuck resolutely to his vision, and apparently did so even in bleak circumstances. Tim and I explore a related idea in our book The Prosperous Peasant, though we phrase the principle this way: “Gratitude Attracts Luck.”

-Oprah: So money has never really interested you?

-McCarthy: No, not really. It’s just … I have friends that are wealthy and have spent their lives making money and they seem to be reasonably happy, but I suspect that they became rich because they were doing what they wanted to do. I think it’s hard to just set out in the world and say ‘I’m going to become rich.’ I think you have, as you said, a passion. And if you do it well then you get rich in spite of yourself.

On this subject of involuntary wealth, McCarthy speaks from first-hand experience. His magnificent work has brought him great material rewards (albeit only recently), which he never clamored for. In addition to the tremendous book sales generated by the Pulitzer and Oprah’s Book Club, last year McCarthy reportedly sold his literary papers to a Texas university for a sum of around $2 million. (This month, his ancient Olivetti typewriter goes to auction, expected to fetch upwards of $15,000 — those proceeds will benefit the Santa Fe Institute, McCarthy’s home away from home*).

-Oprah: … Was it a concern at all, not having money? You know, a lot of people … You’re a different kind of man, because a lot of people would be … would have a lot of angst, a lot of anxiety, would feel a lot of lack of self worth, because they couldn’t earn the money.

-McCarthy: … I was very naive. I always assumed that I would be taken care of in some way or other. And I was, I was always very lucky. Something always happened. Just when things were truly, truly bleak some totally unforeseen thing would occur.

-Oprah: Like …

-McCarthy: Like, I was living in Lexington, Kentucky once … A friend of mine had gotten me this job housesitting, so I had a place to live. But I didn’t have any money. I don’t mean that I didn’t have much money. I didn’t have any money. But there were still some groceries left in the house, so I ate those. And then one day someone knocked at the door, and I went to the door and there was a guy standing there and he said, ‘Are you Cormac McCarthy?’ And I thought, ‘I don’t think there are any warrants out for me.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ He said, ‘Sign this, please.’ I said, ‘What is it?’ He said, ‘I’m a courier.’ And he said thank you and got in his car and drove away, and I opened up the letter and there was a check in it for $20,000. … I was the first fellow of a new foundation that they had started, some people in Chattanooga, the Lyndhurst Foundation. They had some Coca-Cola money … and they were going to give these fellowships to people….

-Oprah: Wow.

-McCarthy: … And you got a [big] check every year for 3 or 4 years.

-Oprah: Do you think you were lucky? Or was there something else going on?

-McCarthy: I wouldn’t get superstitious, but you know, the laws of probability operate everywhere … You know, if you look at Barron’s and see these gurus that have done so well in the market … you’ll notice that next year it’ll be a different group of gurus. This should tell us something. … Some people, at some time in their life, are bound to be in one group [i.e. the lucky group] and not in another group [i.e. the unlucky group]. It’s simply the laws of probability. You don’t have to be superstitious about it. Anyway, it’s a long way of saying that I just think I’ve been very lucky. It could stop, certainly. I don’t think I’m blessed.

-Oprah: You don’t?

-McCarthy: Well, I am blessed because I’m one of the luckiest people I’ve ever known, so that’s certainly a blessing. But I’ve done nothing to be picked out for special … Quite the opposite. If there were justice in the world, they wouldn’t have picked me out to be particularly lucky, because I haven’t done anything to deserve it.

-Oprah: But you made a choice that you were not going to be working in your life. That you were going to do what you really loved.

-McCarthy: That’s right, and that obviously has some influence on it.

Indeed, it seems McCarthy created his own luck, through sacrifice, devotion to excellence, and enduring commitment. Most valuably, this enabled him to channel his energy entirely into his core passion of writing–and later earned him secondary material rewards.

Granted, the circumstances of McCarthy’s life are extreme. Such circumstances, for instance, would likely prohibit a happy marriage and family life. But I believe the substance of his discussion here holds true. He had a vision, and then built a vocation of it by submitting himself to a path that he believed suited and sustained the vision. His work is now destined to endure as some of the finest produced by an American author of his era.

This life path, like all, no doubt has had its share of complications, but within it there’s a main principle at work that is simple and universal: One’s pursuit of a personal vision demands the active qualities of dedication, sacrifice, bravery and hard work, but also a quality more mysterious, and more daunting–Faith.

*UPDATE — McCarthy’s typewriter sold at Christie’s for $254, 500, more than ten times the expected auction price.

(This post has been adapted from the Soul Shelter archives)

You may also enjoy:

“Stacking Stones, Letting Them Fall”

“What Am I Doing With My Life?”

“Fulfillment: A Work in Progress”

“Why Failure’s a Better Teacher Than Success”

“What Do We Really Need to Be Happy?”

“Roadblocks, Restrictions, and Other Helpful Things”

“For A Fulfilling Life, Beware of ‘Wisdom’”

“Hazards of Career, Rewards of Vocation”

“Four Complications of Property“

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for attending this week’s special Soul Shelter convocation. Now allow me to find my notes. … Ah, here they are.

(Shuffling papers)

Well, before we proceed I must tell you that the view from this podium is lovely. You all look just swell in your evening attire.  Please thank your servers, they’re doing a fine job, aren’t they?

(Applause)

Now for tonight’s introduction:

As regular readers well know, a recurring subject on Soul Shelter is one we refer to somewhat dramatically as Technology versus the Soul. Tonight we convene to formally acknowledge the emergence of an organism which embodies this conflict splendidly.

This organism, already amongst us but hitherto nameless, now bears a title thanks to Mr. Dalton Conley and his new book Elsewhere U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms, and Economic Anxiety.

This organism Mr. Conley dubs The Intravidual .

Prophesied more than a decade ago by Sven Birkerts in The Gutenberg Elegies (1998), the characteristics of the Intravidual and the sociological implications of its existence are familiar to us by now. Here’s how Birkerts described them:

We will establish a wide lateral interaction, dealing via screen with more and more people at the same time that our sustained face-to-face encounters diminish. It will be harder and harder — we know this already — to step free of our mediating devices. There will be people who never in their lives have the experience that was, until our time, the norm — who will never stand in isolated silence among trees and stones, out of shouting distance of any other person, with no communication implement, forced to confront the slow, grainy momentum of time passing.

Most of us recall an era of Individualism. We were born in one. We were subject to the laws of time as we waited on the mail, traveled to a friend’s home, or bided the dark hours when the world’s transmissions took a pause. We were subject to ourselves: solitude and privacy were almost unavoidable. We chose and savored them or had them thrust upon us and learned to make the most of them.

Many of us kept journals or diaries, recording and reflecting in sacred secrecy. If we wished, we could clasp the covers shut with tiny locks.

In contrast, today’s Intravidual blogs his thoughts for the world (it is not the purpose of a blog to cultivate privacy). One doesn’t tuck a blog away in a drawer and allow its recorded contemplations to fructify in the soul. The Intravidual clicks “Publish,” watches pixels flash into form, and eagerly awaits comments.

We used to send messages to friends by post, endorsing our salutations with the slow intaglio of the hand and creasing the papers with care. The Intravidual defaults to e-mail (perhaps customized with colored fonts).

We used to relate voice-to-voice by telephone or face-to-face over coffee. The Intravidual defaults to text messages, or connects briefly by voice-mail to alert his correspondents to incoming e-mails. Quickness is crucial, for the Intravidual must maintain countless simultaneous connections to Intraviduals elsewhere and everywhere.

The Intravidual is determined and defined by the efficiency of his gadgets, by his light-speed inclusion in a conversation, an argument, a realm of professed opinion chattering at every hour and encompassing everywhere. The Intravidual exists in a sphere of selves, a sphere that in Mr. Conley’s terms lies perpetually elsewhere– that is, never right here right now. Through his gadgets the Intravidual channels his work directly into his home, once a private space. Fiber optics allow him to constantly import the world and export himself.

Where is nature in this new Intravidualistic order? Where is time, whose constraints once fostered privacy, silence, solitude, which things in turn begat the illuminations of art, religion, and philosophy through the ages?

Faced with what we are becoming, it’s important to recall what we have been. Dictionaries are helpful:

Individual / adj. & n. adj. 1 single 2 particular; special; not general 3 having a distinct character 4 characteristic of a particular person 5 designed for use by one person. n. 1 a single member of a class 2 a single human being as distinct from a family or group 3 colloq. a person (From Middle English = indivisible).

Individual, you might say, is soul. Poet John Keats (1795-1821) described a soul as an Intelligence that has acquired an Identity of its own.

What do we mean by “soul” here at Soul Shelter? I like Birkerts’ definition:

My use of soul is secular. I mean it to stand for inwardness, for that awareness we carry of ourselves as mysterious creatures at large in the universe. The soul is that part of us that smelts meaning and tries to derive a sense of purpose from experience. … Soul is our inwardness, our self-reflectedness, our orientation to the unknown. Soul waxes in private, wanes in public. We feel it, or feel through it, when we are in sacral spaces, when we love, when we respond to natural or artistic beauty.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Intravidual is here. Long live the individual and the soul.*

This concludes our special convocation.

*Some handy tips for cultivating anti-Intravidualism: 1) Try keeping an offline journal, for your eyes only 2) Set a time for powering on, and limit time spent online 3) Write a letter the old-fashioned way 4) Invite a friend for a face-to-face visit, or meet for conversation over coffee 5) Take a walk (longer the better, no connective devices allowed) 6) Read books.

(Thanks to reader Steve for pointing us to Conley’s book.)

(This post appears courtesy of the Soul Shelter archives.)

You may also enjoy:

“Soul School”

“Is the Internet Dangerous?”

“Why Multitasking Slows Productivity — and What To Do About It”

“Six Ways to Stretch Time”

“The Hazards of Career, the Rewards of Vocation“