Day: June 17, 2013

As one who made so many decisions out of fear for so long in my life, I am curious to go to New York City Wednesday with Maria, meet up with my daughter Emma, and all go and see the new movie “Hannah Arendt,” showing almost nowhere but New York. I am lucky to have a wife and a daughter who want to see this movie with me, I was expecting to go alone.

You will not see this movie in the megaplex near you, Hannah Arendt is not somebody corporate entertainment conglomerates are about to put up on marquees. A brilliant moral philosopher and journalist and professor and author, I have a dog-eared copy of “Responsibility And Judgement,” a book on how to make good and ethical decisions that I have used many times. It is becoming more, not less, important to me. If you are not sane, you will not make good decisions no matter what you read, if you get sane or saner, it seems to work out better.

Arendt argues that good decisions come from self-respect, not the advice of other people, and they require some practice in thought. In the world I peer out at from my farm, I do not see people being encouraged to think, they are encouraged to be afraid, and make decisions accordingly. Get  tests, you might get cancer. Stay out of the woods, there are ticks. Build huge IRA’s or you will starve.  Don’t find work you love, you need health care. Keep your cholesterol down, mess up your kidneys. Don’t ever talk to strangers or tell anybody how much your dog cost, it is dangerous out there. Aging is a terror bounded by tests, pills, long-term insurance and health care. You don’t think about how you wish to age or die, you just keep adding options, procedures,  and policies.

Those are not choices or decisions to me, they are a way the outside world has of telling me to do these things or else. To live their idea of life, not mine.  For me, that does not seem like free will.

Frightened people cannot make good decisions – I can testify to this – precisely because their decisions are based on reacting to what frightens them, not to what it is they want or need in their lives. You can eat up a life in a flash that way, the fast-track to what T. S. Eliot called the “hollow life.” If living in fear led to a good life, I would have it knocked, but I do not believe it does. To make good decisions, I have to think, and to re-think, I have to set aside what the world tells me I must have to live, and consider what I tell myself I must have to live a meaningful life.

If I am not being scared to death, I am drowning in unwanted advice and every day each of us must struggle through this swamp and figure out who we really. To make good decisions, I must know myself well. If this shortens my life or brings a plague down on my head, I will accept responsibility and as of now, I will consider it a fair trade.

I was on the phone with Fedex tech support today – their software didn’t like my telephone number, refused to believe it was mine. After escaping the phone tree, I made it to India where a lovely man set to work on the problem while humming some music. After a few minutes, he remembered that I was there and apologized. Did I mind the music, the humming?, he asked. Not at all, I said, it was lovely and it was better than listening to static. Soon he fixed my problem and he said he enjoyed talking to me. Americans usually got annoyed with his humming, he said.  Of course, I thought, they didn’t have time for it. I will make time for it.

Everywhere I go I am being told what to think, what to do, what I need. I can’t recall when anyone last asked me what I think, I  want to do, what I need. This is what I need to keep on learning to do, this is my work, this is Arendt’s vision.

Every time I read Arendt –  this gutsy old-world intellectual, think of her throaty, chain-smoking voice, her gutteral German accent,  her challenge to people to avoid labels and think for themselves – I learn something about decisions. You will not find moral philosophers on cable tv news, even though that might be the best possible thing for all of us.  You find ideologues and dogmatics using ideas as entertainment to feed their own tribes. I’m excited to see this movie and get a breath of the other world and I hope, as always with Hannah Arendt, I learn a thing or two more about making decisions for myself. About learning how to think. I have a farm, but I live a life of the mind, and it is the mind that needs its own grain, as the donkeys need theirs.

Wednesday, I’m going to New York for  a vitamin boost for the mind, an affirmation of the fading are of learning to think for myself.

Waiting for work.

We were out doing the morning chores today when Maria astonished me by hopping up on Fanny’s back. Fanny was a bit startled and circled a bit, then settled, and then Maria hopped off. She said she just felt the urge, and I was not able to move the camera fast enough. Maybe next time. I have had that impulse too, our friend Aidan hopped up on Simon’s back and rode  him around the pole barn. And Fanny loves and trusts Maria, she wouldn’t harm her. I wonder if she’ll try it again. She says she doesn’t know.

I can’t remember the precise point when letters died, I think there should have been an announcement, a ceremony, something to mark the passage of something so important in our cultural, economic and personal history. I still walk to the mailbox every day, even though there are fewer and fewer things of importance in it, most of my critical messaging is sent and received online. Today when I reached in our big mailbox, I felt something unusual – a letter, not a flyer or utility bill, an actual letter, I could tell by the feel of it. It was solid, heavy, on good thick paper. It crinkled, as if something was wrapped inside of it. And it had an actual postmark – it was from a remote corner of Canada, there were four beautiful stamps of the Madonna and child.

I brought it in the house and put it on the table. Maria opened it and said, hey, you have to look at this, and I took it in my hand. Inside was a handwritten message composed so it would fill the middle-third of the page and then could be folded into thirds. Behind it was a tin sheet of  foil crisply wrapped in thirds. When I opened it, there was a fresh new $50 bill. A letter with $50 in it. And a hand-written note, I felt as if I had been visited by a time machine, and I suppose I had.

The letter was from Fram Brummer. To my knowledge, I had never heard of her or seen the name. Seemed clearly from a small town in a faraway province. The penmanship was strong and clear, obviously the product of some education and practice. The tone was friendly, warm, but not in any way inappropriate, it was the message of someone who knew us well, was a regular follower of the blog. She knew what was going on.

First, Fran wished us a happy anniversary. Then she wished me a speedy recovery from Lyme disease and hoped I could get away for a few days. “Love your blog,” she wrote, “and you saved my life on August 30, 2009 when my sister Marion, recommended you. Thanks for all you do!” And she added warmly, “Never quit writing, Sincerely, Fran Brummer.”

Her letter was in response to the new subscription plan I instituted on the blog a week or so ago. People can access the blog for free, or they can contribute any amount they choose for one-time only, or they can now subscribe using Paypal either for $5 a month or $60 a year. The response has been strong and supportive, we are getting underway. Fran does not belong to Paypal and she does not send e-mails when a letter will do. I was touched that she would go to the trouble of getting a brand new $50 bill and then go insert it so neatly into foil – there wasn’t a single wrinkle in the foil, I can’t imagine how she did that – and write her very neat and touching letter, and mail it off. She felt it was important to subscribe in her own way.

That kind of character is inspiring and it also made me realize how much I miss letters. You have to think about a letter, before you send it, and before you read it. Fran had to take a lot of steps beyond e-mail to do that, and I appreciate her understanding that it is time for me to be paid for my work, to allow that and receive it. I would never have accepted Fran’s letter a year ago, or the $50 bill,  now I will paste it on the wall above my computer with my small and growing collection of favorite letters.  Lots of subscribers are letter writers, I see, no surprise. Thanks Fran. If you never quit reading, I will never quite writing.

You give me faith that as long as there are people like you, writers will never fade away like letters.