Milinda’s Questions

If we consider . . . the level which the self-conscious mind at present occupies, we shall find that self-consciousness has got beyond the substantial fullness of life. . . Self-conscious mind has not merely passed beyond that to the opposite extreme of insubstantial reflection of self into self, but beyond this too. It . . . now desires from philosophy not so much to bring it to a knowledge of what it is, as to obtain once again through philosophy the restoration of that sense of solidity and substantiality of existence it has lost. Philosophy is thus expected . . . to run together what thought has divided asunder, suppress the notion with its distinctions, and restore the feeling of existence. What it wants from philosophy is not so much insight as edification. The beautiful, the holy, the eternal, religion, love–these are the bait required to awaken the desire to bite: not the notion, but ecstasy, not the march of cold necessity in the subject-matter, but ferment and enthusiasm–these are to be the ways by which the wealth of the concrete substance is to be stored and increasingly extended.
. . . .

Time was when man had a heaven, decked and fitted out with endless wealth of thoughts and pictures. The significance of all that is, lay in the thread of light by which it was attached to heaven; instead of dwelling in the present as it is here and now, the eye glanced away over the present to the Divine, away, so to say, to a present that lies beyond. The mind’s gaze had to be directed under compulsion to what is earthly, and kept fixed there; and it has needed a long time to introduce that clearness, which only celestial realities had, into the crassness and confusion shrouding the sense of things ,earthly, and to make attention to the immediate present as such, which was called Experience, of interest and of value. Now we have apparently the need for the opposite of all this; man’s mind and interest are so deeply rooted in the earthly that we require a like power to have them raised above that level. His spirit shows such poverty of nature that it seems to long for the mere pitiful feeling of the divine in the abstract, and to get refreshment from that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for the merest mouthful of water. By the little which can thus satisfy the needs of the human spirit we can measure the extent of its loss.
. . . .
The man who only seeks edification, who wants to envelop in mist the manifold diversity of his earthly existence and thought, and craves after the vague enjoyment of this vague and indeterminate Divinity-he may look where he likes to find this: he will easily find for himself the means to procure something he can rave over and puff himself up withal. But philosophy must beware of wishing to be edifying.

Still less must this kind of contentment, which holds science in contempt, take upon itself to claim that raving obscurantism of this sort is something higher than science. These apocalyptic utterances pretend to occupy the very centre and the deepest depths; they look askance at all definiteness and preciseness meaning; and they deliberately hold back from conceptual thinking and the constraining necessities of thought, as being the sort of reflection which, they say, can only feel at home in the sphere of finitude. But just as the-re is a breadth which is emptiness, there is a depth which is empty too. . . . Moreover, when this unreflective emotional knowledge makes a pretence of having immersed its own very self in the depths of the absolute Being, and of philosophizing in all holiness and truth, it hides from itself the fact that instead of devotion to God, it rather, by this contempt for all measurable precision and definiteness, simply attests in its own case the fortuitous character of its content, and in the other endows God with its own caprice. When such minds commit themselves to the unrestrained ferment of sheer emotion, they think that, by putting a veil over self-consciousness, and surrendering all understanding, they are thus God’s beloved ones to whom He gives His wisdom in sleep.

Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit

(Yes, I have a reason for posting this. Stay tuned.)

This guy gives me cause for hope.

I’d like to start this post with a couple of textual references. First, Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane is available in limited preview at Google Books. You can read the entire Introduction online, which is probably enough to frame this discussion. I introduce it as Exhibit A.

Second, I’ve taken a longer look at John Durham’s Understanding the Sacred website. I highly recommend the entire site to all readers who are following the sacred/profane discussion at Kevin’s Walk. In particular, Durham offers a detailed summary of The Sacred and the Profane, followed by what I find to be a persuasive, even devastating, critique of Eliade’s theories. I hereby introduce Durham’s pages on Eliade as Exhibit B; I’ll be quoting from them at length a little later on. (It should go without saying that I don’t expect anyone to agree with me that his criticisms are persuasive until you read them yourself.)

Let’s now return to the substantive discussion. First, I want to emphasize one part of Otto’s conception the numinous: Namely, that the numinous is wholly other; it is

that which is quite beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible, and the familiar, which therefore falls quite outside the limits of the ‘canny’, and is contrasted with it, filling the mind with blank wonder and astonishment.

(BTW, in Otto’s original German “wholly other” is ganz andere and “holy” is heilig, so can the w/holey puns, please.)

With that in mind, let’s consider what Kevin tells us about Eliade:

In his work, Eliade talks about how objects like natural stone formations acquire their sacrality.

And a glance at the first few pages of The Sacred and the Profane confirms that Kevin’s summary is correct.

In regard to the sacrality of natural objects, Durham raises an objection which I find persuasive:

The unmediated sacred is encountered in primary religious experience. For religious believers, it is a matter of spontaneous, personal, direct contact with the supernatural. James had discussed this contact in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Then Otto had discussed the same sort of thing in The Idea of the Holy, as the encounter with the numinous. It was in this context that Otto had used the term ‘wholly other’.
. . . .
The mediated sacred is encountered in secondary religious experience, that is to say through the provisions of organised religion. It involves the religious use of phenomena belonging in some way to the natural world and it may be open not just to a spiritual elite but to believers generally.

Now Otto’s term, wholly other, was applied by him to the first sort of experience. It is impossible to see how Eliade may legitimately extend its use to the second kind of religious experience, involving natural objects such as stones or trees, and, we may suppose, believers generally rather than an elite.

I don’t agree with all of this: it seems to me better to talk about religious experience along a continuum of intensity, rather than making a hard-and-fast distinction between primary and secondary religious experience. And it seems to me erroneous to say that “secondary” religious experience is necessarily mediated through organized religions; I don’t think that’s orthodoxy even among said organized religions. But Durham’s concluding point, that it is impossible to see how the term “wholly Other” can be extended to natural objects such as stones or trees, seems to me completely compelling. And it seems to me that this error is pervasive in Kevin’s discussion of the holy/profane distinction.

Let’s turn now to a side issue that’s arisen in the discussion. It started when one of Kevin’s commenters and regular readers, Addofio, wrote in:

If everything is sacred, there’s a certain “so-what?”ness to any claim that any particular thing or experience or action is sacred. Educators and liberals get regularly pilloried for making the analogous claim that “Everyone is special;” it appears to piss some people off no end. Maybe because simple logic than concludes that if everyone is special, then no one is. And if to be sacred means something special, but everything is sacred, and someone feels or claims that thus-and-such is sacred, the instant comeback is “So what? So is every other thus-and-such in the world.”

Excellent point. And Kevin’s response

I might reply with a question: “If everything boils down to energy (in various forms and states), does the word ‘energy’ mean anything?”

misses that point (although it is, I admit, an entirely adequate rejoinder to the misleading way I offhandedly expressed the argument in one of my own comments.) To get at the basic issue: Eliade says,

The first possible definition of the sacred is that it is the opposite of the profane.

It should be evident that if that’s your complete definition of sacred, and you then turn around and say “the sacred is not other than the profane,” then neither term means anything. (The details of the argument will come out differently depending on whether you formulate it in terms of Otto’s “wholly other” or in terms of Durkheim’s more mundane “that which is set apart”, but the basic logical problem is the same.)

Granted, intellectual charity requires us to assume that Eliade didn’t really intend this as a complete definition or conceptual analysis of the term sacred: rather, that’s what the whole rest of his book is. However, I’ve been unable to uncover a coherent short account of Eliade’s concept of the sacred that doesn’t run into this problem. Here’s how Durham puts the point, or a closely related one:

The Sacred & the Profane is based on a fundamental contradiction. Eliade wants the sacred to be ‘wholly other’ and simultaneously wholly familiar. He defines the sacred in terms of the ‘wholly other’, yet sets out to demonstrate that his ‘religious man’ lived a life immersed in the sacred.

At the start of his book, Eliade offers an example of the sacred ~ profane distinction that a modern, non-religious person will understand: the contrast between the inside and the outside of a church, separated by the threshold. Let’s consider this example as illustrative of Eliade’s problem.

A modern, non-religious person will certainly appreciate the point Eliade is making. Thus tourists who go inside a medieval church today will very likely get some vague sense of the ‘wholly other’. That’s because a building like that will be wholly outside their ordinary experience.

But what about the kind of person who actually attended such a church regularly in its heyday, the medieval peasant, Eliade’s religious man in the flesh. It is extremely difficult to believe that such a person’s experience was not that of the wholly familiar.

I submit that this problem will affect the discussion so long as we don’t redefine or enrich the concept of the sacred/holy/numinous so that it has more attributes than merely “that which is set apart.”

With that, I want to turn, somewhat abruptly, back to Otto’s account of the numinous, which does offer some of that richer conception.

There’s a summary of what Otto means by the numinous online here, as well as at Durham’s site. And portions of The Idea of the Holy can be read online at Google Books. A few central points to be gleaned:

– the numinous inspires awe, dread, a sort of profound unease.

– the numinous is overpowering, and inspires, among other things, a feeling of humility.

Otto describes [this] as a “piercing acuteness… accompanied by the most uncompromising judgment of self-depreciation, a judgment passed, not upon his character because of individual ‘profane’ actions but upon his very existence as creature before that which is supreme above all creatures.”

In this state, we are moved to praise the might of the numen, because its might demands praise and even more because it is absolutely deserving of praise.

Accompanying the disvaluation of self is the feeling of being unworthy to be in the presence of “the holy one” (we fear that our presence might even defile him).

– the numinous creates an impression of immense vigor and energy.

– The numinous fascinates or draws us to it with a force that is nearly irresistible.

– It arouses in us a mental state of stupor, a “blank wonder, an astonishment that strikes us dumb, amazement absolute.”

Let’s compare that list to Kevin’s powerful description of some of his own experiences:

Every glance, every jostle, every pivot, every twinkle of a baby’s eye, every grandmother’s delighted cackle, every twitch of a prowling kitten’s tail, is infused with infinite significance. And by the same token: every bellowed swear word, every dollop of poop, every punch thrown in anger, every murder, every natural disaster– these things, too, are pregnant with meaning. All these phenomena together make up the Holy and the Ordinary, twins who aren’t twins at all, but one and the same.

For me, seeing the sacred and the profane as not-two is what brings me down to earth in the middle of a baptism. It’s also what makes me delight in the weight of a happy dog that’s too big for my lap but still sprawled there, chest up, begging for a scratch.

Eloquent, moving, poetic. But frankly, it doesn’t sound to me very much like what Otto had in mind by “the numinous.”

I don’t mean to tell Kevin that he can’t call these experiences “religious”, or think of himself as a religious person. I do claim that the appeal to 20th-century scholarly work in the phenomenology of religious experience, as exemplified by Otto and Eliade, fails, and as it stands, he’s offered us a purely personal definition of religion.

In the introduction to my previous post, I said that the issue of the appropriateness of scatological humor etc. on Kevin’s blog was very much secondary, so I planned to address it last. In thinking through the issues I discussed in the latter part of that post, though, I’ve revised that judgment, and want to introduce a second theme into my critique of Kimism (Kimianism?):

The sacred/profane distinction is an inadequate basis for understanding the various objections that have been raised to some of his web content.

To back up: Some folks (friends of Kevin’s mom, as I recall), had problems with some of the stuff Kevin has for sale at his Cafe Press shop. I expressed a certain amount of sympathy with their complaints. Then, Kevin’s friend Mike thought that one of Kevin’s political posts wasn’t appropriate for the blog, since it wasn’t about a religious issue. I disagree with the latter judgment. (I have a little more problem with some of the list-of-things-to-do-today posts and the lengthy photo dumps, but that’s no big deal.)

The important point is that these two objections are very different in nature, and I think Kevin errs by conflating them. It seems to me he understands things as follows: there’s a distinction between the sacred and profane, which is equivalent to the distinction between what’s religious and what isn’t; and people object both to political humor and to scatology on his blog because both fall under the profane/unreligious category.

I think this is overly simplistic, for the following reason:

To think clearly about these matters, the sacred/profane dichotomy is inadequate. Instead, we should think about people’s attitudes and reactions in terms of a three-part typology: the sacred, the ordinary, and the taboo.

In many ways, the sacred and the taboo are very much alike insofar as they are set apart, are designated as “other” in relation to the ordinary. Any dictionary definition of taboo will mention the Polynesian origins of the term, and give “sacred” as one of its meanings. In colloquial terms, the ordinary is the stuff that it’s OK for us to get as close to as we want any time we want, to muck around in to our heart’s content, whereas both the sacred and the taboo are set apart. The difference is that whereas with the sacred we’re supposed to, as it were, show reverence from afar, the taboo we’re supposed to shun entirely.

To get back to the case at hand: what lies behind the objection to political or everyday content on the blog is the notion that it isn’t sacred, but ordinary. On the other hand, what lies behind the objection to scatology and some forms of sexual humor is that it violates a taboo. In other words:

Politics is ordinary. A turd is taboo.*

I suspect that Kevin’s response to this line of thought will be “There should be no taboos.” Well and good; if God made everything, God made turds and farts too, so they’re as sacred as everything else. The problem is that taboos are psychologically and culturally real. I’ve seen this, for example, in the way a Japanese office worker instinctively shudders when an uncouth gaijin (yours truly) shoves a bottom file cabinet drawer shut with his foot; the same kind of “gut” reaction that Westerners would feel at seeing someone licking a toilet seat. There’s evidence that taboo-words (fuck, shit, etc.) are processed in a different part of the brain than most of the lexicon, a part that’s much more closely linked to the primitive emotional centers of the brain.

The consequence: talking about the nondualism of the sacred and the profane isn’t a sufficient response to Kevin’s mom’s friends who are offended by the poop jokes, because that response doesn’t get to the heart of their objection. The task of getting someone to see God in a fart is much more problematic than getting someone to see God in a ham sandwich or an earthworm or a block of cement. There may be some readers who, expecting to find a discussion of religious matters and finding instead a post about political topics or last night’s dinner, will be puzzled or just bored. I think most will get the point, or can be brought to see it. But (a lot of) people are going to experience flatulence jokes or softcore porn differently. The violation of a taboo is intended to be transgressive, to upset people, to create aversion.

Which has its purposes, as long as you’re aware of what you’re doing.**
______________________________
*And as for all the turds who are in politics . . .

(Sorry. I couldn’t help myself.)

**I’m frankly not sure whether this final sentence is really a conclusion or whether I’m breaking off in mid-rant. I want to get this posted, though.

In his post of October 11, “Irreligious Religiosity“, Kevin Kim has given us an eloquent and moving account of some of the most important aspects of his experience of life. It would be arrogant, unjustifiable, and just plain silly of me to try to say that he’s “wrong” — whatever being “wrong” could mean when talking about such matters. I don’t want anything I say here to be construed as trying to do that.

Rather, my thesis in this series of posts will be: Kevin’s viewpoint, as expressed in “Irreligious Religiosity” and in other things he’s written — which I’ll summarize as the view that the core of religion is the experience of the numinous — is inadequate as a foundation for a full discussion of religious diversity and pluralism. In other words, I’m saying that, from that perspective, one will be unable to fully appreciate — to “get a handle on” — the full range of philosophical, social and political issues raised by the diversity of religious beliefs and practices.

For the time being, this is a purely theoretical discussion, with no practical consequences. I think that these issues may have concrete ramifications for the project of Kevin’s Walk, but I don’t want to insist on that now. In fact, my writing here might be thought of, in part, as an exploration of that question: Do these theoretical issues make any difference when you’re talking to people about religious differences?

A couple of other points:

– In addition to talking about the numinous, Kevin characterizes his view of religion as being informed by Zen and philosophical Taoism. I think there are problems with his interpretation of both of those traditions, and I want to address those problems. (I see that Kevin’s added a couple of footnotes that touch upon these issues.) But that’s a secondary issue, so I’ll set it aside for now and try to address it at the end, in an appendix of sorts.

– Another issue that’s arisen in the discussion on Kevin’s blog concerns the appropriateness of scatological humor there, the sacredness of bodily functions, etc. As far as I’m concerned, that’s very much a secondary issue, and I regret that some things I’ve said seemed to have turned the discussion in that direction. Nonetheless, I do have some thoughts on these subjects. So, if I ever get that far, that’ll be Appendix Two.

THE SACRED AND THE NUMINOUS

Kevin begins by discussing the sacred-profane distinction as it’s formulated in the work of Mircea Eliade. To get a handle on the issues at stake here, I propose that we back up a little, both historically and conceptually.

The concept of “the Sacred” as a category of social analysis originated with Emile Durkheim. To oversimplify greatly, before Durkheim, “sacred” was just a word that religious people used to describe things that had something to do with God. (I submit that a Google search on the terms “Durkheim” or “Durkheim + sacred” will confirm that claim.)

The important point for present purposes is that for Durkheim, the Sacred is an essentially social notion. Durkheim didn’t believe for a moment that there really is some transcendent or spiritual realm that humans access through “the experience of the Sacred,” and part of his project was to explain how people could have come to believe such a thing. His answer: the setting apart of some things as apart, untouchable, tabu, Other than the mundane stuff of daily life, functions as a means of social control (or more precisely, plays a role in a complex system of social control.) It’s telling that Durkheim’s primary example of a sacred object is a national flag. (A political scientist once told me that the one thing that’s “sacred” in contemporary American culture is The Individual.)

We need, then, to trace the history of the concept from Durkheim to Eliade. Kevin provides an important clue in his use of the term ” numinous“, which was coined by Rudolph Otto. A full account of what Otto means by the term would be a subject for a book, not a blogpost: I think a pretty good summary is given by John Durham at his website Understanding the Sacred:

As a kind of first approximation for the wholly new concept he is giving us, Otto characterises the numinous as the holy (i.e. God) minus its moral and rational aspects. A little more positively, it is the ineffable core of religion: the experience of it cannot to be described in terms of other experiences.
. . . .

Otto’s next approximation is the notion of creature-feeling. He suggests that those who experience the numinous experience a sense of dependency on something objective and external to themselves that is greater than themselves.
. . . .

[He] goes on to indicate in concrete terms the kind of experience he is considering. Quotations are essential here so that we are absolutely clear on what Otto has in mind.

. . . .

It is to be found:

“in strong, sudden ebullitions of personal piety, … in the fixed and ordered solemnities of rites and liturgies, and again in the atmosphere that clings to old religious monuments and buildings, to temples and to churches.”

It may peaceful:

“… sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship.”

or faster moving:

“thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its ‘profane’, non-religious mood of everyday experience”

even violent, erupting:

“from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions”

and leading to:

“the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy”

The crucial point here is that Otto, unlike Durkheim, takes the traditional explanations of such experiences seriously. He believes that they provide genuine access to a transcendent reality. And it seems to me that this difference between Otto’s and Durkheim’s positions is absolutely crucial, and that this crucial difference gets elided in Eliade’s version of the sacred/profane distinction (and/or in Kevin’s presentation of that distinction.)

(Why should the reader believe any of this? Well, my hunch as to Eliade’s relationship to Durkheim and Otto is confirmed by that universal repository of all knowledge, the Wikipedia:

Mircea Eliade, among the most influential twentieth-century scholars of religion, adopted Durkheim’s terminology, but Otto’s idea.

And further confirmation can be found all over the web. Here and here* are good places to start.)

Why is all this important? Why make such a big deal out of it?

Because I think it’s important to pry apart two distinct themes – the sacred/profane distinction on the one hand, the numinous on the other – to think clearly about Kevin’s discussion of the sacred and the profane, dualism and nondualism, what’s religious and what isn’t.

Which I’ll do in my next post.
_________________
*For what it’s worth, the latter source begins with this rather critical remark:

Mircea Eliade travesties Durkheim in The Sacred & The Profane (1957) by ignoring completely his fundamental contribution to the study of the sacred. Durkheim had made the sacred – profane dichotomy a central theme of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), but Eliade passes over this in total silence, leaving you to suppose he is himself first in the field, with no previous account to consider.

But no need to pile it on.

Welcome, those of you who are coming here from Kevin’s Walk. (Welcome to everybody else, too.) It looks as if now that Kevin is going to be in one place for a while, and seems to have found a community of supporters in that area, the focus of his blog is turning towards the original purpose of the Walk: to explore religious diversity. I thought I’d throw in my two cents worth on some of the topics being discussed.

In a recent post, Kevin quotes one Father Komonchak as follows:

I hate it when people say they want to agree to disagree. I’m a New Yorker. For New Yorkers, disagreement is the beginning of the discussion, not the end!

Well, I’m the farthest thing from a New Yorker, and I concur wholeheartedly with the good father’s sentiments on this matter. In fact, one of my maxims is:

To agree to disagree is always a failure of communication.

Granted, when one finds oneself in a communication breakdown, as we all do, agreeing to disagree is one of the less pernicious alternatives; it’s preferable by far to beating up or slaughtering the folks you disagree with. Nonetheless, it’s a failure, for reasons I’ll try to illuminate.

One of Kevin’s correspondents, Charles, comments on the issue as follows:

I’ve found, though, that when two people disagree on a fundamental issue, there are only three possible outcomes. The least likely (in my experience) is that one person will change their mind. The other two outcomes are that the argument continues (sometimes in future sessions) or that it doesn’t.

Charles neglects to mention a fourth outcome, one, which is always logically possible and at least occasionally practically achievable (and, IMO opinion, the most desirable): that both participants end up changing their minds, and that thereby the discussion advances further towards the truth.

(Before I go on, let me make a parenthetical observation to ward off possible misunderstanding: it makes a great deal of difference whether we’re talking about a theoretical or a practical disagreement. That is, is the disagreement over The Way Things Are or over What Should We Do? From what little I know about the practical arts of negotiation and conflict resolution, the most successful strategy is to set theoretical issues to the side and concentrate solely on practical resolutions. (This is may be one of the things that people mean by “agreeing to disagree.”) While this is doubtless a good thing when communities or individuals are at war with one another (literally or figuratively), I want to defend the intrinsic value of exploring theoretical disagreements. As one of my favorite writers wrote,

The theoretical man, like the artist, takes infinite delight in everything that exists.

and I see no reason to give up that delight any more often than doing so is absolutely unavoidable in order to attain some greater good.)

To return to the main topic: What justifies my claim that that the ideal resolution of a disagreement is for both participants to change their views? Briefly, in making that claim I’m assuming a particular conception of what “the truth” is: it’s the conception that’s associated with the great American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, and is generally known under the label truth as the ideal end of inquiry. To some things that Peirce said about this idea:

Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief.
. . . .
The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you.
. . . .
The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality.

(For sources of these quotations consult the section on Peirce in the Wikipedia article “The pragmatic theory of truth“, which is where I culled them from.)

Obviously, there’s a great deal that needs to be elucidated even in those brief statements, and as regards Peirce’s view as a whole (including the fundamental question: Does the view make any sense at all?) Rather than start into that elucidation now, I’m going to set it aside (literally: I’m cutting a few of paragraphs from this post and putting them in a separate file), for reference later in case anyone’s interested in discussing it further. For now, I’m going to assume the desirability of “keeping the conversation going*” and make a brief suggestion about how to keep the conversation going.

One frequently hears claims to the effect that ” Disagreements about premisses mean that that discussion can’t take place between those interlocutors. ” (I actually took that wording from a discussion on a blog.) This statement is WRONG. To reiterate to Father Komonchak’s words, and extend his point a bit:

Disagreement on basic premisses is the point at which the interesting discussion starts, because at that point the focus turns to the examination of premisses.

And, if anybody’s interested, I’ll say something in a later post about how that can be done.
__________
*Some readers may recognize this phrase, even before they click on the link, as an allusion to the work of Richard Rorty. As reading the page I linked to will reveal, Rorty carries on something like the Peircean tradition, but in more radical form, because he denies that there is any truth, just the conversation. While googling around for an exact source for the phrase, I discovered, or was reminded, that Rorty once wrote a paper called “Religion as a Conversation-Stopper.” It’s discussed here and here; people following Kevin’s blog will probably find both articles interesting reading.

I only got turned on to David Foster Wallace a few weeks ago. I read something-or-other in Slate, I think by Ron Rosenbaum maybe, listing what he thought were the most enjoyable pieces of English prose. D.F. Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” was on the list. I mentally put it on my list of things to read. A week or two later I was at a party with some friends, and we were talking about favorite reads. They vehemently championed Wallace’s Infinite Jest. This reinforced my intention to read him, and within a week or so I read “A Supposedly Fun Thing.” I was blown away. The other pieces in the book were uneven, but my overall impression was: the man has a brilliant mind, and takes the style of the formal essay to places it’s never been before, captures the way people really talk now when they’re thinking about really serious things.

And now he’s gone.

RIP.

Observant visitors will note that the blogroll has disappeared from this blog’s sidebar. (More precisely, returnees may note that; first-time visitors will note that the sidebar has no blogroll.) The explanation: I’ve recently performed a couple of upgrades: to the latest version of Wordpress, 2.6, and to the latest version of Blog.txt, the theme I use. Somehow these changes caused my blogroll to go haywire, displaying itself in all sorts of unexpected ways that I’m still trying to figure out. Until I get the bugs worked out, I’m just keeping the whole thing hidden. So if you used to be linked on this site, don’t take offense. I haven’t deleted you permanently, and the link to your site should be reappearing soon.

Update: The theme you see now isn’t Blog.txt, but its sister theme, veryplaintxt. Both themes are designed by Scott Wallick, and are available at plaintext.org, the very finest source for minimalist Wordpress blog themes. Veryplaintxt is a less versatile theme than blog.txt; but in certain circumstances, including the present ones, that’s a good thing rather than a bad thing. You see, veryplaintxt is a 2-column theme, whereas blog.txt is adaptable; you can set it up in either 2-column or 3-column format. How can that be bad? Well, even when the blog’s phenotype is 2-column, its underlying genotype is 3-column, which means that behind the scenes that single sidebar over to the right is divided into Sidebar 1 and Sidebar 2. And when you’re trying to debug a sidebar, or anything else, complexity is to be avoided. So I’m going to work with the simpler format.

Besides, there are some things about this theme I like. The big gray open quotes that start out each block quote, for example. I never really liked the gray boxes that were part of blog.txt. Or maybe I’d just gotten tired of them.

Update 2: Switched back to blog.txt, for various reasons.