Welcome to the 31st edition of Content Nausea. You can read No. 30 right here. You read it the most of any edition, and it was one of my favorites. Thank you for being here.
Thomas Merton was an American Trappist monk during the 1950s and 1960s. When my family was driving cross country in 2002, we stopped at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky to visit his grave. He was, in the words of the men who gave us directions, “buried between two foxes.” There were two men with the last name “Fox” buried on either side of him. Some monk humor, I guess.
Jenny Odell cites Merton’s writings in 2019’s How To Do Nothing as, in the words of The A.V. Club, “one example to demonstrate how necessary silence is to our lives, and how purposeful retreats should be balanced with engagement with one’s fellow man.” Merton’s writings were an ambient presence in my house growing up, though I never engaged with them. His name was on the bookshelf, and his name came up in conversation.
How To Do Nothing brought Merton back into my consciousness, especially with Odell drawing a connection from monastic life into present day. One of the message of Odell’s writing is that while doing “nothing,” one can still remain engaged with the outside world. Merton, from an outside perspective — particularly from 2020’s vantage point — dedicated his life to “doing nothing.” But Merton’s writing shows a deep engagement with the outside world despite his residence at a monastery in Kentucky.
I started Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander late last year and finished it early this year. Much of the writing, published in 1966, remains prescient, and it burrowed out its own place in the back of my brain. Over the past few weeks, it began gnawing at me again. So I went through a notebook where I had jotted down some of my favorite passages and typed them up here. The page numbers from my edition are in brackets. Please excuse any typos because my handwriting is poor.
Solitude has its own special work: a deepening of awareness that the world needs. A struggle against alienation. True solitude is deeply aware of the world’s needs. It does not hold the world at arm’s length. [12]
We live in crisis, and perhaps we find it interesting to do so. Yet we also feel guilty about it, as if we ought not to be in crisis. As if we were so wise, so able, so kind, so reasonable, that crisis out at all times to be unthinkable. It is doubtless this “ought,” this “should” that makes our era so interesting that it cannot possibly be a time of wisdom, or even of reason. We think we know what we ought to be doing, and we see ourselves move, with the inexorable deliberation of a machine that has gone wrong, to do the opposite. A most absorbing phenomenon which we cannot stop watching, measuring, discussing, analyzing and perhaps deploring! But it goes on. [60-61]
What I am saying is, then, that it does us no good to make fantastic progress if we do not know how to live with it, if we cannot make good use of it, and if, in fact, our technology becomes nothing more than an expensive and complicated way of cultural disintegration. It is bad form to say such things, to recognize such possibilities. But they are possibilities, and they are not often intelligently taken into account. People get emotional about them from time to time, and then try to sweep them aside into forgetfulness. The fact remains that we have erected for ourselves a culture which is not yet livable for mankind as a whole.
Never before has there been such a distance between the abject misery of the poor (still the majority of mankind) and the absurd affluence of the rich. Our gestures at remedying this situation are well-meant but almost totally ineffective. In many ways, they only make matters worse (when for instance those are supposed to be receiving aid realize that in fact most of it goes into the pockets of corrupt politicians who maintain the status quo, of which misery of the poor is an essential part).
The problem of racism — by no means confined to the southern United States, South Africa, or Nazi Germany — is becoming a universal symptom of homicidal paranoia. The desperation of man who finds existence incomprehensible and intolerable, and who is only maddened by the insignificance of the means taken to alleviate his condition.
The fact that most men believe, as an article of faith, that we are now in a position to solve all our problems does not prove that this is so. On the contrary, this belief is so unfounded that it is itself one of our greatest problems. [67-68]
In moments that appear to be lucid, I tell myself that in times like these there has to be something for which one is willing to get shot, and for which, in all probability, one is actually going to get shot. What is this? A principle? Faith? Virtue? God? The question is not easy to answer and perhaps it has no answer that can be put into words. Perhaps this is no longer something communicable, or even thinkable. [101]
The more I am able to affirm others, to say “yes” to them in myself and myself in them, the more real I am. I am fully real if my own heart says yes to everyone. [140]
In our society, a society of business rooted in puritanism, based on a pseudoethic of industriousness and thrift, to be rewarded by comfort, pleasure, and a good bank account, the myth of work is thought to justify an existence that is essentially meaningless and futile. There is, then, a great deal of busy-ness as people invent things to do when in fact there is very little to be done. Yet we are overwhelmed with jobs, duties, tasks, assignments, “missions” of every kind. At every moment, we are sent north, south, east and west by the angels of business and art, poetry and politics, science and war, to the four corners of the universe to decide something, to sign something, to buy and sell. We fly in all directions to sell ourselves, thus justifying the absolute nothingness of our lives. The more we seem to accomplish, the harder it becomes to really dissimulate our trifling, and the only thing that saves us is the common conspiracy not to advert to what is really going on. [194]
A personal crisis occurs when one becomes aware of apparently irreconcilable opposites in oneself. If the tension between them is strong enough, one can no longer “keep himself together.” His personal unity is fractured. There are various pathological ways of trying to handle the fracture. For instance, reconstructing a unity built on one half of the opposition and projecting the unacceptable half upon the world and upon other people. Then the half of oneself that is still acceptable becomes “right” and the rest of the world becomes wrong. If the conflict is intense, then the other world, other people, other societies are regraded as heretical, malicious, subversive, demonic, etc.
A personal crisis is creative and salutary if one can accept the conflict and restore unity on a higher level, incorporating the opposed elements in a higher unity. One thus becomes a more complete, a developed person, capable of a wider understanding, empathy and live for others, etc. All this is familiar. [207]
There is a sense of desperation running through this whole society, with its bombs and its money and its deathwish! We are caught in the ambiguities of a colossal sense of failure in the very moment of phenomenal success. We have everything we ever claim to have wanted, and yet we are more dissatisfied than we have ever been. People are eating their hearts out with fury and self-hate, just when they have all the money and all the leisure and all the opportunity, apparently, to really live. They find that the kind of life everyone dreams of is in fact impossible. They cannot face leisure. They cannot handle prosperity. I think we would be happier in a real crisis instead of in a constant series of imaginary ones that we cannot possibly live with. Perhaps this unconscious sense of unreality will finally drives us all into a real cataclysm, just to have the relief of getting away from fictions and imaginations! [265-266]
Our professed ideals may still pay lip service to the dignity of the person, but without a sense of being and a respect for being, there can be no real appreciation of the person. We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being.
As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have— for their usefulness. When man is reduced to his function, he is placed in a servile, alienated condition. He exists for someone else or even worse for some thing else. Hence he cannot enjoy life. The ethos of our society places an enormous emphasis on “having fun,” but our whole concept of joy is mendacious because it is servile. Even the fun that we have is for a purpose. It is justified but by its gratuity, its simple celebration of the gift of life, but by its utility. It makes us feel better, therefore helps us to function better, work better, get ahead in life. Since our fun usually costs something — one cannot have fun without buying all kinds of toys, commodities and refreshments — it helps the economy. Also, since we have more uproarious fun than anyone else, our fun proves the superiority of free enterprise over the grim and admittedly sullen pragmatism of the socialists.
Why then aren’t we happy? Because of our servility. The whole celebration is empty because it is “useful.” We have not yet rediscovered the primary usefulness of the useless. [312]
How To Do Nothing is one of the best books I’ve read in the past few years, and it was a worthwhile exercise to pull one of the many threads Odell ties together in her writing. In Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, some of Merton’s writing echoes true in 2020, which is unexpected in some ways. The trappings of my apartment and life in Philadelphia in 2020 are much different than Trappist, Kentucky, in the 1950s and 1960s. But the constant thoughts and societal pressures remain the same, and Merton unpacks those through his writings.
In a loud and overwhelming world, we might feel like the only option is to pull back and completely isolate ourselves. But it is possible to retreat from the noise and the chaos while attempting to remain engaged. That’s relevant right now, and it’s a concept that has turned over in my head countless times over the past few weeks.
I am still trying to rediscover the primary usefulness of the useless.
Thank you for reading the 31st edition of Content Nausea. Please let me know if you liked this format. I am considering doing something similar for other books in the future, but I do not want to bore you. It will get better. Thank you, and see you soon.
[instrumental]
—D.G.