Dryden

Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;
He who would search for pearls must dive below.

- Dryden, All for Love, Prologue

Self-Control

There is an interesting article in this week's The New Yorker, Don't! The Secret of Self-Control by Jonah Lehrer. Interesting, perhaps, because I agree with it.

I have yet to see any sort of good study that links a portfolio of core behaviors (Pattern Recognition, Sustained Focus, Self-control, Empathy, Attentiveness, Curiosity, Imagination, Anticipation, Judgment, Critical Thinking, Prioritization, etc.) to desired life outcomes but I think that slowly, slowly evidence is beginning to emerge that there is a tight causative relationship. Already we know that diligence (work) trumps IQ as does self-control.

We also know that there is a pretty high correlation between degree of reading capability and habits and life outcomes. When you look at that list of behavioral traits, many of them are fostered by the habit of reading. It is not just a function of reading making us more knowledgeable but rather that the act of reading reinforces underlying behavioral traits which foster success.

That wicked Oscar Wilde

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.

Desert Copts

Yesterday I was looking to confirm a name of one of my father's friends and was rereading his autobiography Far Away Places With Strange Sounding Names. I found the name but in doing so came across this little anecdote regarding a drilling project in Egypt:

Our proposed drill site was approximately 30 kilometers west of the highway between Cairo and Alexandria. The driving instructions to the rig were rather easy. Drive to the "Halfway House", a petrol station and restaurant - the only building on this 400 kilometer road between the two cities, and turn left. While surveying the site where we planned to drill, I did a little exploring of the area. I was roughly 20 kilometers northwest of the drill site and came across a remarkable community. I had crossed over a sand dune and saw before me a small basin oasis, perhaps 2 kilometers in diameter. In the center was what looked like a mud-walled fort straight out of a "Beau Geste" movie. I drove on down to the front door, got out of my Land Rover, and encountered "Bernard", a monk.

I had stumbled on a Coptic Christian Monastery, in an otherwise, uninhabited desert. There were about 35 monks living there, more or less self-sufficient and independent of the world outside. They had a water well which allowed them to grow crops and raise goats and sheep, all inside the one hectare area surrounded by the walls. According to Bernard, they spent six hours per day at worship or in prayer. The rest of their waking hours were spent tending the crops and animals. Bernard gave me a tour of the chapel and living quarters. The chapel was decorated quite ornately, but the living quarters gave true meaning to the word, simplistic. I didn't feel it appropriate to inquire, "why the hell are you spending your life like this", but that was certainly the uppermost question in my mind. History teaches us that men have been living in monasteries since religion was invented, but I can't even begin to understand why. Bernard invited me to join them for the evening meal. I was, however, getting a bit nervous about finding my way back to civilization before dark, so I declined, thanked him for the tour and headed back to town. It was a unique experience, best described as "baffling".

Perhaps one answer is in the environment of the desert monasteries. Last night I finished Alan Moorehead's A Late Education and in it came across this passage. Moorehead is describing the effect of the desert upon him and his companions in the early days of the war when the massive armored build-up had yet to occur:

And yet the story of the desert war seemed to write itself. There never was a place which so moved one to composition. Within an hour of arriving in the desert ideas came crowding into one's mind, and if there was no action for days together it made no difference. Life there was so completely abnormal that the first element of a newspaper story was always present: the element of contrast, the spectacle of familiar people (in this case the soldiers) reacting to a strange place. But the real reason why the war correspondents did rather better in the desert than anywhere else was because the issues were simple. There were no distractions, no cities, no railroads, shops, cinemas, markets, farms, children or women. There was no fifth column, and there were no politics. We never saw money or crowds or animals or hills and valleys. We saw the arching sky and the flat desert stretching away on every side. Consequently the small incident (as distinct from the set-piece battle) achieved a significance it would never have had in Europe or the tropics, and we saw it clearly, we saw all round it, we knew its beginning and its effect. Certiainty of detail like this seldom falls to the journalist. He works at such speed he has no time for a methodical checking of his facts and so he has to hedge, to qualify, to suggest rather than to state a fact. In the desert it was much easier. We could state a thing boldly because we saw it in isolation, and most events other than the actual battles came as clearly before our eyes as a single ship at sea. Moreover our own lives were simple.

The desert had an antiseptic effect upon nearly everyone who went there in the war. That is to say it destroyed most of the small indulgences and even the vices that eat like parasites into our lives in normal times. In this immense untenanted space it was nearly impossible to commit any of the deadly sins; the food was appalling (mostly bully beef and biscuit), liquor virtually non-existent, and so the glutton inside oneself withered away. In the complete absence of women, even of pornographic books, advertisements and entertainments, there was no stimulus to sexual desire except that which was self-induced by dreams and secret memories; and even the echoes of such vicarious, unanswered lust tended to to grow faint after a time. It was absurd to be avaricious, envious or jealous where no one had any possessions or privileges to speak of, and the desert by its very nature compelled the slothful man to bestir himself in order to remain alive. Then, too, the fear of death and wounding in this distant place was a mighty destroyer of pride. This enforced monasticism might, of course, in itself have been more deadly, more stultifying, than any sin, had not the desert provided its own distractions and its own bizarre rewards.

A Late Education

Alan Moorehead is a regrettably little recollected Australian author famous for his WWII books, Mediterranean Front, A Year of Battle, and The End in Africa; as well as Gallipoli, The Blue Nile, and The White Nile. I have enjoyed them all but my favorite is the marvelllously illustrated Darwin and the Beagle.

Looking for another book in my library, I came across Alan Moorehead's A Late Education, (1970) an autobiographical book that is in part a tribute to his WWII friend and fellow correspondent, Alexander Clifford. The following passage reads in such contemporary language about an almost unimagineably distant period; the early years of the Spanish Civil War. It reads like a scene from the movie Casablanca.

Anyone who was involved in the Spanish Civil War on the Franco side will remember St Jean de Luz on the Basque coast in southern France. Like the town of Riga in the Russian revolution it was a neutral staging-post on the edge of the conflict, and every traveller, whether he was a black-marketeer, a diplomat, a secret agent or a journalist would pause there for a while on his journeys in and out of Spain.

In St Jean de Luz you could get anything from a forged passport to a million-peseta small-arms contract, and it was a remarkable place for intrigue. Had the French government not kept order there would have been serious disturbances in the town, since the foreign colony and many of the French themselves were sharply divided into two camps - those who were for Franco and those who were against him - and they hated one another with a deep emotional hatred.

The centre for all this agitation was a cheerful little restaurant called the Bar Basque that still exists in the main street, and sooner or later everyone of any consequence made their way there in order to read the newspapers and pick up the latest gossip. There was no item of news about the fighting, whether it was the shipment of tanks from Russia or Moors from Morocco, the destruction of Guernica or the rising of the Fifth Column in Madrid, that was not either invented in the Bar Basque or discussed there with embellishments early in its course round the town.

Outwardly there was nothing sinister about the Bar Basque: you might have taken it as just another fashionable seaside restaurant that possibly merited a star in the Michelin guidebook. There were Basque murals on the walls, scenes of pelota players and peasants dancing the jota, and the decor was rustic walnut and red plush, all of it very comfortable and modern. People took their aperitifs under striped umbrellas in the street, where a line of horse-drawn cabs stood waiting under the trees, and then towards one in the afternoon and eight or nine in the evening the restaurant began to fill. One ate jambon de Bayonne (which was said to have lain all winter, salted and raw, maturing under the snow of the Pyrenees), langoustines, anchovies and tiny eels, angouilles, that were brought in each morning by fishing boats from the Atlantic, red and green pepper salads, jam omelettes and melons. On Thursday nights there was a cabaraet and a dance, and they served a dish of roast duck cooked with peaches, oranges and green peas. The wine was the local rose or Bordeaux, brought from the vineyards on the Garonne only three or four hours away by road, and after the meal one drank a local liqueur, pale and sticky, called Fleurs d'Hendaye.

I remember these lucullan details so well because it was at the Bar Basque that I first met Alex in 1938, and in the years that followed the roast duck, the dancing of the jota and the wine became for us symbols of the good lost life to which we hoped to return one day. Through the lean nineteen-forties we thought of the place almost as nostalgically as an ageing woman will recall some romantic moment of her past, a ball, an evening at the theatre, a holiday by the sea, when she first fell in love.

Precariousness

Protagoras (circa 485 BC - 415 BC) was of the era when some of Greece's deepest thinkers were laying the groundwork for much of western philosophy and culture. Born in Thrace, he wrote On Truth and On the Gods, travelled widely across the Hellenic world lecturing on grammar, rhetoric and ethics. Pericles was his patron.

For all his fame and influence, none of his books have survived. Indeed, the only thing that has come down the millenia is a single fragment. But for all that, it is a ringing and intriguing statement of belief that has figured in the writings of many of our great philosophers and men of action. Pro or con regarding his most famous phrase, he remains relevant against all the odds. His one surviving fragment?

Man is the measure of all things; of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not. Of the gods I know nothing, whether they exist or do not exist: nor what they are like in form.

Fate is disconcertingly capricious.

Oliver Cromwell

Oliver Cromwell to the parliamentarians of his day (1653):

"Depart, I say; and let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!"