ThinkBlog

In a recent email conversation with a friend (hi, JW ) I was discussing Camusian atheism and how he’s widely considered the most literary of the existentialists apart from the perhaps quite aptly named “Grandfather,” viz. Dostoyevsky [1, 2, 3]. It reminded me of a comment from his Notebooks that I still had yet to blog about, so here go some notes on page 109 of the Modern Library text I was using.

In every life, there are a great number of small emotions and a small number of great emotions. If you make a choice: two lives and two types of literature.

He’s right, I think, and not just two types of literature but almost two types of epistemology: this seems to me uncannily like the difference between the Jungian Sensing & iNtuitive types (xxSx and xxNx, respectively) in their approach to how we understand the world and how we are able to interact with it. Perhaps this is an unfair confusion of terminology that I should let lie, though. It’s worth thought, though I think not worthy of the bathroom mirror above something from, say, Galatians or Proverbs.

The pleasure that one takes in male relationships. The subtle pleasure of giving or asking for a light—a complicity, a kind of freemasonry of the cigarette.

The “freemasonry of the cigarette”! Today we often don’t let ourselves enjoy a good, social smoke as such for fear of addiction, cancer, or even seeming hypocritical. I remember, though, as a high schooler, carrying a brushed chrome Zippo on my person at all times so that, should anyone around me ever need a light (I didn’t smoke anything, ever, at that point), I would have a light on me, and I would enter into that temporary yet somehow transcendent pact of friendship that can occur even between strangers, when one proffers flame to another who has need of it. (Think of “need” here loosely.) Glad to know that I’m not the only one who’s ever romanticized a somewhat less than healthy pastime.

(That said, there are better things to be Romantic about, if one should tend to that “life,” that “literature,” if you will.)

In a recent email conversation with a friend (hi, JW ) I was discussing Camusian atheism and how he’s widely considered the most literary of the existentialists apart from the perhaps quite aptly named “Grandfather,” viz. Dostoyevsky [1, 2, 3]. It reminded me of a comment from his Notebooks that I still had yet to blog about, so here go some notes on page 109 of the Modern Library text I was using.

In every life, there are a great number of small emotions and a small number of great emotions. If you make a choice: two lives and two types of literature.

He’s right, I think, and not just two types of literature but almost two types of epistemology: this seems to me uncannily like the difference between the Jungian Sensing & iNtuitive types (xxSx and xxNx, respectively) in their approach to how we understand the world and how we are able to interact with it. Perhaps this is an unfair confusion of terminology that I should let lie, though. It’s worth thought, though I think not worthy of the bathroom mirror above something from, say, Galatians or Proverbs.

The pleasure that one takes in male relationships. The subtle pleasure of giving or asking for a light—a complicity, a kind of freemasonry of the cigarette.

The “freemasonry of the cigarette”! Today we often don’t let ourselves enjoy a good, social smoke as such for fear of addiction, cancer, or even seeming hypocritical. I remember, though, as a high schooler, carrying a brushed chrome Zippo on my person at all times so that, should anyone around me ever need a light (I didn’t smoke anything, ever, at that point), I would have a light on me, and I would enter into that temporary yet somehow transcendent pact of friendship that can occur even between strangers, when one proffers flame to another who has need of it. (Think of “need” here loosely.) Glad to know that I’m not the only one who’s ever romanticized a somewhat less than healthy pastime.

(That said, there are better things to be Romantic about, if one should tend to that “life,” that “literature,” if you will.)