I was reading some of Oscar Wilde’s short stories and writings at the Brookline Tatte this morning. The coffee shop was absolutely packed so I resorted to sharing one of those big tables in the middle of the room with 9 strangers. It’s probably the least intimate setup I could think of.
I was reading The Critic as Artist II. I find reading it to be kind of difficult, Oscar uses this faux dialogue to make his points and leans heavily on references to people of the time that I have never heard of. The footnotes help, but I still find myself reaching the end of a page having retained zero of the content. When I do understand it, he does make strong and surprisingly relevant points for a guy writing in the 1890’s. This was the essay where he famously claimed that life imitates art, good stuff.
Towards the end of the story, he calls out something that struck me. He’s talking about journalism, specifically as a record of what the culture is so focused on at a given moment. He claims:
“By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us what little importance such events really are.”
In an instant this shot me back to when I was painting a week ago. I use old Wall Street Journal copies from 2022 when I paint to protect the floor, and reading the flurry of old headlines is always funny:
Even three years out, there’s so much that’s irrelevant or inconsequential that was worthy to print, and so many key developments happening that weren’t published at all. And yet – I read the damn thing each and every day. Despite its haphazard ability to gauge importance, I still feel the need to know just in case. It’s sort of this big lie that we can understand the importance of things as they happen. The lie isn’t that we’re often wrong, it’s that we believe importance announces itself while it’s happening. I feel so strongly that I’m interpreting new information well. This is good, this is bad, etc. The truth is, I don’t have a clue.
During last year’s NBA playoffs, I was absorbed in the Denver vs. LA series. Totally locked in. At the time it really felt like a meaningful series. 2x MVP Jokic battles Finals MVP Kawhi and MVP James Harden. Denver, the series winner, didn’t even make the conference finals. I can’t say I’m rushing to rewatch it, I might never watch a minute of that series ever again. At the time it felt like it had stakes, I imbued it with a gravitas that turned out to be underserved.
So – Was that a waste of time? Is reading the newspaper? How likely does something have to be to have long-term meaning before it’s worth committing our ever-so-finite time to? If that’s our measure, I have zero reason to ever watch the Bulls.
Kurt Vonnegut does a brilliant job elucidating this lie via Hamlet. Hamlet, like me, like you, doesn’t have a clue if each event is good or bad. The result is that nothing really happens, it’s all ambiguous. His rudderlessness is all of us, or, should be all of us. Shakespeare is directly calling out this lie via Hamlet, and it’s why it’s so important a piece. Kurt: “we are so seldom told the truth, and in Hamlet Shakespeare tells us. We don’t know enough about life to know what the good news is, and the bad news is, and we respond to that. Thank you Bill.”
This is just as much a cultural lie as it is a personal one. It’s really what Oscar was talking about. Chuck Klosterman wrote a book I quite like called “But what if we’re wrong?” He talks of great artists that were dismissed at the time but later became classics, and how we should try to view the present with the perspective of the future. Obviously, this is imperfect, but it’s a way of lessening our delusion. I really enjoy when Klosterman talks about cultural memory – the issue at hand is that in time detail is lost but context is gained. The net is, per Klosterman: “to matter forever, you need to matter to those who don’t care. And if that strikes you as sad, be sad.”
So: we’re clueless in the short term and, culturally, oblivious of the details in the long term.
So what the hell do we do? There’s something called the Chinese Farmer Parable1 that seems to advise on this issue. I was compiled by Liu An in 139 BCE, and it says:
塞翁失馬，焉知非福 (sài wēng shī mǎ, yān zhī fēi fú)
“When the old man at the frontier lost his horse—who could know it wasn’t a blessing?”
The full parable goes further, but you get the idea. The prescription here seems to be: postpone judgement. Avoid immediate reaction. Nietzsche referred to this as learning to see. We need to widen our acknowledgement of the lie as things happen, and pay much closer attention to how things actually turn out relative to our immediate feelings. Take a mental inventory – what feels important right at this moment? Based on your history, what of that will actually be important in a week, month, year, or your lifetime? You’ll still fall for the lie, you’ll still be wrong, but this is a step towards distilling some awareness and I suspect your behavior will begin to change as a result if you start.
Seems easy enough. Thanks for the collab Oscar, Jokic, Kurt, Shakespeare, Chuck, An, and Nietzsche.
Colin
- The actual name of this is Old Man of the Frontier Loses Horse, which I strongly prefer ↩︎