Jordan Peterson of Toronto

Salvete, qui legantes sint - 

My sons have been talking of this "new feller", Professor Jordan Peterson, and the HUGE splash he has been making in the cyber-world.  From what I have gaathered so far, he's made of equal parts Joseph Campbell, Karl Jung, and Dr. Laura Schlesinger.  I have yet to read his materials.

But the online response to his teaching and exhortations has been, as I said, HUGE.  He's become an overnight Absurdity cure, apparently.  So tonight I will begin his book, "12 Rules: an Antidote to Chaos".  If indeed it's aimed at the problem of life in the modern world, it is ipso facto of interest.

Controversy surrounds him - so I make no pronouncements yet.  Would it matter if I did so, prematurely?  Not to the world, but to me - yes!  Defective as I am, I still need to try to be fair and accurate.

I have read a critique of him published recently by another author I need to read - one Pankaj Mishra, author of "Age of Anger", his book about the general return to authoritarianism and violent nationalism and so on world-wide.  Mishra's topic seems critical to me, watching from the sidelines as the world's bedbugs - Neo-Nazis, Tea Party-ists, and others of dubious intent - have come to the fore over the last decade or so.

More to come.  Valete.

Literary Gems: Education of Henry Adams

For someone who is literate, I've really read very little in my life.   And read a lot of it late, to boot. 

The other night, passing a book store's dollar-rack, I perused it and picked up 'The Education of Henry Adams', and am enjoying it.  I hasten to add that I have but begun it; as usual, I have about five different books in play; but I carry it with me daily. 

His encounters and discoveries mirror mine in a significant way, in that he finds himself ever erroneous in his expectations, and finds all his education in astonishments, reversals, and dismay.  To that degree, I am continually heartened as he relates the twists and turns of his 19th century upper-crust career. 

(More later.)

Thick, the Clouds

Bene --

Coming back from depression.  Again.

It's always a question of "How" for me - some people may well have a facility of pluck or discipline or grit that allows them to throw a stern, guiding hand over their individual selves and steer this way or that, independent of their emotions - and despite having tried feebly over the years to nurture such a facility in my Self - I lack such a power.  I only encounter something like it in the depths of depression, something that says, "No, all the rhymes and platitudes of others fail; I have the choice, to try to live or to take myself away."  And thereafter I only arise from those depths by accepting my weaknesses and nursing myself with positives - I live, I breathe, I am not among the worst off, I grow old but am still able to get by, I enjoy little but can still enjoy nonetheless.  So the first is somewhat on the order of the Existential, but the second is decidedly Epicurean!  And then, in my silly & superficial profession, I style myself Stoic:  taking as a base that there is ultimately one universe, that some to-us-more-or-less-magical basis informs it, that causation exists and eliminates mere chaos, that the order of things cares not a fig for human lives or frailties, and so on.

Reason, if at the base of things, is something we discover and apply, as best we can.  But being human, it is not the Reason of the Cosmos that I cultivate, but that of a human being -- social, individual, and imperfect like all palpable things.

Valete.