Words&Dirt

“Fairly or not, I found myself disappointed with Tallent. As I have said, I did not and do not consider anthropologists the most creative and disarming of thinkers––though they do take superlative and meticulous notes––but I had come to admire what I had grown to see as his single-mindedness. But he was also to be my first lesson in the strange phenomenon that besets all of us who travel to strange places and find our own assumptions and lessons proven not just wrong, but opposite. It is very easy to be intellectually brave in such locations, where the academy, one’s peers, and the entirety of Western history and religion feel not only irrelevant but misguided. But unlearning things is much more difficult than learning them, and even the most courageous of minds will find itself tempted to retreat back into the known at the first opportunity. It is astonishing and a little sad to realize how many discoveries, how many advancements, have been delayed for years, for decades, not because the information was unavailable but because of sheer cowardice, fear of being laughed at, of being ostracized by one’s colleagues.

Luckily, I was never limited by such worries or constrained by such fears (being ostracized by my colleagues seemed something to covet, not avoid).”

––The People in the Trees, by Hanya Yanagihara, pg. 305-6

“In many pre-modern, traditional societies it is through his or her membership in a variety of social groups that the individual identifies himself or herself and is identified by others. I am brother, cousin and grandson, member of this household, that village, this tribe. These are not characteristics that belong to human beings, accidentally, to be stripped away in order to discover ‘the real me’. They are part of my substance, defining partially at least and sometimes wholly my obligations and my duties. Individuals inherit a particular space within an interlocking set of social relationships; lacking that space, they are nobody, or at best a stranger or an outcast. To know oneself as such a social person is however not to occupy a static and fixed position. It is to find oneself placed at a certain point on a journey with set goals; to move through life is to make progress––or to fail to make progress––toward a given end. Thus a completed and fulfilled life is an achievement and death is the point at which someone can be judged happy or unhappy. Hence the ancient Greek proverb: ‘Call no man happy until he is dead.’”

––After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, by Alasdair MacIntyre, pg. 33-4