It is a great relief to be back writing this newsletter again after a long week away. Whatever virtues vacations might have, it is good they end eventually. There’s only so long the body can live in suspended animation. After the initial awkwardness goes away, the last strings that keep one docked in the harbour of reality fall away and you soon drift out beyond the horizon.
I spent part of my vacation in the city, where I was confronted with heat, humidity, a watermelon oolong black lemonade tea that I promptly threw back up, a shirtless man who repeatedly punched the hood of a car, and a chorus of people who chased me every which way chanting “CONEHEAD.” These ludicrous scenes sent me reeling for home, where I submerged myself in the lake to ponder the secrets of the universe.
As I bobbed up and down that first moonlit night back home, it occurred to me that Shakespeare’s keenest insight was his claim that “all the world is a stage.” Indeed, all the world is staged. Of all the “many parts” we play, the one role we always perform is that of the perspective. The world is nothing but an endless series of perspectives - human perspectives, the perspectives of the “lower” animals, of the UFOs, the ghosts, and so on.
When I say the world is staged, I do not mean to suggest there is some vast conspiracy against the human race. It may well be the case that we are dealing with some sort of Dickian demiurge that condemns us to our perspectives. Supposing that’s not the case, what we are dealing with is simply the natural byproduct of existing in a world with limitless perspectives.
Our perspective transforms our environment into a stage for us to perform on. Everything that is caught in our gaze, the ground, the stars, furniture, trees, books, plates, motorcars, and so on, becomes a prop. This is inescapable. The sheer number of perspectives that are jammed together on this planet makes it impossible to escape the stage. Even if one were left all alone, they’d still be trapped with their perspective.
Now, I do not claim to be anything special for having discovered this. Just as no one is free from sin, no one is free from their perspective, even if they recognize what I have just outlined.
A friend tells me all I have done is stumble upon Hegelian idealism, but I am not sure.
It was at this point a firefly flew over my head. This strange incursion marked the first time I have ever seen a firefly on my property. They usually lurk in the forest, about a fifteen minute walk away, but have crept ever closer in the last couple months. Their appearance was only a matter of time and, indeed, they could not have picked a better one.
The fireflies inspired me to finally crack open Goethe: Life As A Work of Art by Rüdiger Safranski. Someone had given it to me a couple Christmases ago. As is often the case, it was soon buried in a pile of a dozen other books.
Safranski’s biography serves as a haunting reminder that we will never see someone like Goethe again. He was truly the last of the Renaissance men. Even in the last decade or so of his life, Goethe found himself increasingly isolated. His friends died, the young writers had no use for him, and the political climate left him unnerved.
Goethe lived in a time of great upheaval. He came of age just as the French Revolution began and died in 1832 while its aftershocks were still being felt. He spent the twilight of his life in a time of great levelling, where the yoke of the absolute monarchy was cast off in favour of absolute mediocrity. Those, like Goethe, who kept each toe in a different pool, were shunned. They were trying to do too much.
In the end, Safranski concludes that Goethe’s life “is the great example of how far you can go when you accept the lifelong task of becoming who you are.” So much of this quasi-Nietzschean talk straddles a thin line between self-help books published by the Waffen SS and something useful.
Goethe was fortunate to have been born into comfortable circumstances, but material comfort does not guarantee a happy life. As Safranski put it, Goethe knew the freedom he was endowed with had to be “re-earned” for it to be of any use. Goethe could have led his life as the Bertie Wooster of Frankfurt, a member of the idle rich, whose only concerns lay in the petty intrigues of social life. Instead, he committed himself to a life without limits, straddling literature, politics, philosophy, natural science, and beyond.
What a pitiful world. It is by the grace of Jove that I am totally unaware of any news from the last week. So, if you were looking for some pithy remark on the bombing of Santa’s workshop, the awful typhoon in Luxembourg, the new war or the awful scandal involving those two monks, you will have to look elsewhere.
ADDENDUM: Congratulations to Boris Johnson on winning the leadership of the Conservative Party. Country Topics is happy to have given him the boost that pushed him over the edge, Wikipedia be damned.
Long live DUDEism!