Ars longa, vita brevis

"Wide ass, white briefs." Years ago I might have offered up just such a translation of the Hippocratic motto that serves as our title and as our lesson. It would have been a wild guess, based on faint homophony. It would have been me bullshitting, as was my principal occupation for most of my early life.

Against all real evidence, I spent my adolescence so convinced of my own genius that I figured all I had to do was just ride along and watch a great life --my own-- unfold. From the third-person perspective, this would have appeared as laziness, and I suppose it was that, among other things. But it was also rooted in a peculiar perception of time, in particular of the relationship of the present to the future. The present, namely, seemed eternal, and therefore the future seemed wholly fictional. Art was long, but I had an eternal present in which to dally in anticipation of someday getting around to mastering it.

The first time I succesfully derived the conclusion to the syllogism that says all men are mortal, and moreover that I am a man --the first time it hit me, that is, what the real implication of putting that major and that minor premise together is--, my relationship to the future changed fundamentally. I can't isolate the moment, but at some point it all shifted, from dalliance to urgency, to getting it all into my head before the syllogism was carried through once and for all.

Yet astoundingly, even after I figured out I was mortal, the bullshitting continued. I continued to make great claims for myself, to assert expertise on whatever the subject at hand happened to be. I tried to keep a stock of two or three things to roll out for any topic whatsoever that might come up (two or three sufficed for the appearance of infinitude). If my limitations were ever found out, I could point beyond the topic at hand and insist that my expertise was somewhat elsewhere.

In some ways I can't help but feel that blogging is a continuation of this bad habit: I'm entirely in charge; I hit 'post' when I'm good and ready; before that I can consult Google to fill in any gaps. Like a mosquito that grows bright red and swollen by sucking the blood from a beast it could never fathom, I can now get my omniscience parasitically by sucking a drop here and there from that truly omniscient beast, the Internet.

I'm a mortal whose time is running out, who always imagined he'd be omniscient, and only belatedly realized he did not have an eternity in which to get there. I am a being torn between an impulse to real mastery born of fear of death (I have, after all, managed to learn a few things fairly well), and a tendency, born of early illusion, to rest content with vagary, approximation, and bullshit. Blogging came along at just the wrong time, and attempted to throw the fight in favor of that old bullshitting hooligan, whom it sees as its kind of fighter.

(Let me add at this point that the Internet, it has been commented, like Shiva, is both destroyer and giver at once. I don't doubt that great works of art will be, and may even now be in the process of being, launched from Typepad, and critics of the future will praise the brave young visionaries on whom tradition did not weigh, who felt no loyalty to the centuries of book-learning that for far too long defined what it is to be learned, eloquent, and profound. But I was built on the old model. There's nothing to be done about that now.)

As some readers will know I've recently begun a semester-long membership at a research institute in the United States, with a perfect library and seemingly boundless resources for the facilitation of intellectual advancement. This transplantation --the first extended period of time I will have spent in my native country since I moved to Canada in 2003-- has brought about in me an intense reflection on what I ought to be doing with myself, how I ought to be filling up my limited time, to what ends, and why. If life has been at various moments and in various combinations devoted to pleasure, posturing, and projects, it is as if of late it has streamlined itself into only the last of these: life as pure project.

Having projects suited to a finite creature means, in part, giving up omniscience as an end. That can be left to the omniscience-prosthesis, without resentment, and without a jealous desire to masquerade as it, to pull off a pointless imitation of the mechanical repository of all knowledge. But there still are bodies of knowledge to master: Sanskrit, something of the history of astronomy, more of the cognitive-science literature, the theoretical treatment of abductive inference, for example. (I've got what experts in the art of back-handed compliments like to call an 'ambitious' book that I'm writing; and I will write it.) This is what I am proposing to myself to do, in a very earnest way, for the next little while.

This will involve something of a separation from the electronic media that have so taken over my experience of daily life (just today I was invited to participate, apparently as an expert, in a psychiatrists' conference on addiction and the Internet! More details on this soon). I will not promise to abandon jehsmith.com altogether, but you can at least expect to see fewer posts here from now until midsummer, and the posts you do see here will be more clearly anchored, I hope, as fragments of a long-term project, in the subjects --besides that old fallback subject, the self-- in which I like to claim expertise.

I remember years ago --perhaps right around the time I learned that fatal syllogism-- meeting older scholars who spoke earnestly of just wanting to finish this or that study of this or that obscure philosopher before the inevitable recrudescence of the tumor for which they'd just been treated. I thought: My God. So this is what a life comes to. And it is, and the most famous among mortals adjust themselves to that fate while there's still time.

Comments

[Al]

"But there still are bodies of knowledge to master: Sanskrit, something of the history of astronomy, more of the cognitive-science literature, the theoretical treatment of abductive inference, for example."

I like your blog and read it regularly, but with sentences like that, you come off as impossibly pompous.

[Justin]

Why that sentence, Al? I meant it very seriously: these are all subjects I am currently attempting to master. What is pompous about that?

[Jim]

I like your blog very much. Good luck with your project.

[Bill]

Good luck with your project, Justin. Your blog is one my first stops every day.

[eggoabbas]

I wish that "will not promise to abandon" was "will promise not to abandon". This is great site.

[gregh]

re "what I ought to be doing with myself". If you enjoy yourself and are nice to others, that is enough. More is a bonus.

Good luck with 'life as a project' - perhaps, if there were a God, we would be born with a gantt chart.

[skholiast]

"Having projects suited to a finite creature means, in part, giving up omniscience as an end. That can be left to the omniscience-prosthesis, without resentment"

This in itself could be the project of a lifetime!