You've Not Got Mail (So Stop Checking)

"In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office." -- Thoreau, "Life Without Principle" (1854)

My New Year's resolution is to spend less time checking my e-mail. I check it more than frequently, and more than is necessary, even when I'm not expecting anything in particular to come. (What am I expecting?...) Thankfully, I don't (yet) have a smartphone, so I have to go to my computer to check it. This means I have some hope of checking it less, and I should do less pointless checking at home. This will also keep me off the computer when I'm not doing something (comparatively more) important like writing. How often does a quick email check turn into wasted time on the internet!

Good luck with your own resolutions, and Happy New Year to All!

Well, I'll be a comfortable savage...

Ah, Thoreau, Walden:

And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him. As I understand it, that was a valid objection urged by Momus against the house which Minerva made, that she "had not made it movable, by which means a bad neighborhood might be avoided"; and it may still be urged, for our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them; and the bad neighborhood to be avoided is our own scurvy selves. I know one or two families, at least, in this town, who, for nearly a generation, have been wishing to sell their houses in the outskirts and move into the village, but have not been able to accomplish it, and only death will set them free.

Granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire the modern house with all its improvements. While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings. And if the civilized man's pursuits are no worthier than the savage's, if he is employed the greater part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he have a better dwelling than the former?

Which is to say: I've bought a house, and have been thinking about Thoreau the whole damn time...now I have to go read Whitman again, quickly. "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

Inspiriation?

Somehow, I find this inspirational, particularly when I recall that Hume wrote his Treatise when he was 27, and that Mill was a polyglot by (something like) 5:

Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises?

From Thoreau, Walden (Conclusion)