Laudator Temporis Acti

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I confess that it warmed the cockles of my heart to see Enron's Kenneth "Kenny-Boy" Lay do the perp walk in handcuffs.

In English we borrow the German word 'Schadenfreude' to describe the emotion of joy at seeing someone else's misfortune. It's one of those compound words whose meaning you can almost figure out if you know the roots, in this case 'Schaden' (harm, damage) and 'Freude' (joy).

In his Parerga and Paralipomena, volume II, chapter VIII (On Ethics), section 114, Schopenhauer criticizes the emotion in the strongest terms (tr. T. Bailey Saunders):

But it is Schadenfreude, a mischievous delight in the misfortunes of others, which remains the worst trait in human nature. It is a feeling which is closely akin to cruelty, and differs from it, to say the truth, only as theory from practice. In general, it may be said that it takes the place which pity ought to take -- pity which is its opposite, and the true source of all real justice and charity....Envy, although it is a reprehensible feeling, still admits of some excuse, and is, in general, a very human quality; whereas the delight in mischief [Schadenfreude] is diabolical, and its taunts are the laughter of hell.

Nietzsche, in Human, All Too Human, II (The History of the Moral Sentiments), 103 (The Harmlessness of Malice), refers to this passage when he asks, "Is Schadenfreude diabolical, as Schopenhauer says?" He argues that it isn't.

The ancient Greek word for Schadenfreude is also a compound, 'epichairekakia', from the preposition 'epi' (upon, over), the verb 'chairo' (rejoice), and the noun 'kakia' (disgrace). Diogenes Laertius (Lives of the Philosophers 7.114) defines it as 'pleasure at another's ills', and Aristotle (Art of Rhetoric 2.9.5, tr. John Henry Freese) connects it with envy ('phthonos'):

He who is malicious [epichairekakos] is also envious (phthoneros], since if the envious man is pained at another's possession or acquisition of good fortune, he is bound to rejoice at the destruction or non-acquisition of the same. Wherefore all these emotions are a hindrance to pity [eleos], although they differ for the reasons stated; so that they are all equally useful for preventing any feeling of pity.

The parallels between Aristotle and Schopenhauer are obvious. But there were some ancient Greeks who did not regard the emotion as sinful. In Sophocles' Ajax (79), the goddess Athena asks the question, "Is not laughter at one's enemies the sweetest laughter?"

In Latin, Schadenfreude is 'malevolentia' (ill-will), defined by Cicero in his Tusculan Disputations (4.9.20) as 'pleasure at another's misfortune, without any gain of one's own' ('voluptas ex malo alterius sine emolumento suo').

One of my favorite modern essayists, Kihm Winship, compiled a list entitled If I Could Only Take One Library to a Desert Island..., which contains the charming admission "Kihm Winship, because I would be lying if I told you I did not love the sound of my own voice." I always like to hear about such lists, in the same way that I enjoy looking at the contents of bookshelves when I visit someone's home.

The June 6, 1962 issue of The Christian Century magazine contains C.S. Lewis' answer to the question, "What books did most to shape your vocational attitude and your philosophy of life?" Here is Lewis' list:

1. Phantastes by George MacDonald
   
2. The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton
   
3. The Aeneid by Virgil
   
4. The Temple by George Herbert
   
5. The Prelude by William Wordsworth
   
6. The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto
   
7. The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius
   
8. Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell
   
9. Descent into Hell by Charles Williams
   
10. Theism and Humanism by Arthur James Balfour
    

Probably the Bible was too close to Lewis' heart even to need mention.

In the essay on Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment in his Essays in Criticism, Matthew Arnold makes a surprising choice:

People talk of this or that work which they would choose, if they were to pass their life with only one; for my part I think I would choose the Abbé Migne's collection.

He is referring to Patrologiae Cursus Completus, the voluminous works of the Greek and Latin Church Fathers edited by Migne.

Among the favorite books of former President William Clinton is Living History, by Hillary Rodham Clinton. A chivalrous gesture, but an insincere one, I suspect.

One question that exercises me: Should you take to the desert island books you've already read, or those you've never read? When I go on vacation, I sometimes bring a book I've never been able to get through, so that lack of anything else will force me to read what I couldn't before.

My short list of books for a desert island would probably contain:

1. Bible (King James version)
   
2. Homer
   
3. Horace
   
4. Rabelais
   
5. Montaigne
   
6. Shakespeare
   
7. Boswell's Life of Johnson
   
8. Schopenhauer
   
9. Thoreau
   
10. Dickens
    

But it would pain me to part with almost any book in my collection. I sometimes consider winnowing my bookshelves, but I find little chaff among the wheat.

C.S. Lewis, letter to Dom Bede Griffiths, OSB:

I sometimes wonder if an interest in liturgiology is not rather a snare. Some people talk as if it were itself the Christian faith.

Daniel E. Whitney, in IEEE Spectrum (May 1987), p. 47:

Manual assembly is rapidly disappearing as an option in high-tech products because mere people are inadequate in terms of quality, documentation, and cleanliness.

To paraphrase Romans 3:23, "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of the machine."

In the first book of Plato's Republic (329 b-c, tr. Paul Shorey), Cephalus is talking about old age. He says, "I remember hearing Sophocles the poet greeted by a fellow who asked, How about your service of Aphrodite, Sophocles -- is your natural force still unabated? And he replied, Hush, man, most gladly have I escaped this thing you talk of, as if I had run away from a raging and savage beast of a master."

One wonders what Sophocles would have thought of the modern pharmaceutical industry, which makes billions of dollars from a product (sildenafil citrate) designed to unleash that raging and savage beast.

The National Endowment for the Arts just released a report documenting a precipitous drop in the number of adults in the United States who read literature, with the steepest decline occurring among young adults, those aged 18 to 34. The full report, 60 pages in PDF format, is available here.

As I see it, there are at least a couple of possible explanations. Perhaps Americans are at last taking to heart Schopenhauer's strictures against reading (tr. T. Bailey Saunders):

Reading is thinking with some one else's head instead of one's own. To think with one's own head is always to aim at developing a coherent whole -- a system, even though it be not a strictly complete one; and nothing hinders this so much as too strong a current of others' thoughts, as comes of continual reading.

In other words, Americans might be reading less because they are thinking more.

Or, perhaps Americans are becoming like the Smallweeds in chapter XXI of Dickens' Bleak House:

"Don't you read, or get read to?"

The old man shakes his head with sharp sly triumph. "No, no. We have never been readers in our family. It don't pay. Stuff. Idleness. Folly. No, no!"

Maybe Americans have realized that reading just doesn't pay.

Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), p. 221:

Some marine animals never sleep, although they may rest. Most sharks, for example, have to keep moving all their lives, or the flow of water through their gills will cease and lack of oxygen will kill them. The dolphins are confronted with an even worse dilemma: they must return to the surface every two or three minutes to breathe, and so can never allow themselves a moment's unconsciousness.

If you appreciate a good hoax, you'll love this essay by David Lehman on The Ern Malley Poetry Hoax.

Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (1964), p. 19:

Christians today stand far closer to the early Church than their grandparents did. Christianity began as the religion of a small minority existing in a predominantly non-Christian society, and such it is becoming once more.

St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei (The City of God) 15.22:

And thus beauty, which is indeed God's handiwork, but only a temporal, carnal, and lower kind of good, is not fitly loved in preference to God, the eternal, spiritual, and unchangeable good. When the miser prefers his gold to justice, it is through no fault of the gold, but of the man; and so with every created thing. For though it be good, it may be loved with an evil as well as with a good love: it is loved rightly when it is loved ordinately; evilly, when inordinately....So that it seems to me that it is a brief but true definition of virtue to say, it is the order of love.

Sic enim corporis pulchritudo, a Deo quidem factum, sed temporale carnale infimum bonum, male amatur postposito Deo, aeterno interno sempiterno bono, quem ad modum iustitia deserta et aurum amatur ab avaris, nullo peccato auri, sed hominis. Ita se habet omnis creatura. Cum enim bona sit, et bene amari potest et male: bene scilicet ordine custodito, male ordine perturbato....Unde mihi videtur, quod definitio brevis et vera virtutis ordo est amoris.

Samuel Johnson, Life of John Dryden:

There are men whose powers operate only at leisure and in retirement, and whose intellectual vigour deserts them in conversation; whom merriment confuses, and objection disconcerts; whose bashfulness restrains their exertion, and suffers them not to speak till the time of speaking is past; or whose attention to their own character makes them unwilling to utter at hazard what has not been considered, and cannot be recalled.

George Eliot, Felix Holt the Radical (1866), chapter 16:

Comprehensive talkers are apt to be tiresome when we are not athirst for information, but, to be quite fair, we must admit that superior reticence is a good deal due to the lack of matter. Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled nest-egg; and when it takes to cackling, will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.

I like to think my reticence resembles the former type, but I fear it really resembles the latter.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies: A Love Story (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), p. 163:

My theory is that the human species is getting worse, not better. I believe, so to speak, in an evolution in reverse. The last man on earth will be both a criminal and a madman.

Phaedrus 4.23.1:

A learned man always has riches within himself. (Homo doctus in se semper divitias habet.)

Chamfort, Maximes et Pensées:

The most wasted of all days is that one on which we have not laughed. (La plus perdue de toutes les journées est celle où l'on n'a pas ri.)

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles 1.14.2:

Now, in considering the divine substance, we should especially make use of the method of remotion. For, by its immensity, the divine substance surpasses every form that our intellect reaches: and so we cannot apprehend it by knowing what it is. But we have some knowledge of it by knowing what it is not. And the more things we can remove from God through our intellect, the closer we approach to knowledge of Him.

Est autem via remotionis utendum praecipue in consideratione divinae substantiae. Nam divina substantia omnem formam quam intellectus noster attingit, sua immensitate excedit: et sic ipsam apprehendere non possumus cognoscendo quid est. Sed aliqualem eius habemus notitiam cognoscendo quid non est. Tantoque eius notitiae magis appropinquamus, quanto plura per intellectum nostrum ab eo poterimus removere.

Henry David Thoreau, Journal, November 16, 1851:

Thinkers and writers are in foolish haste to come before the world with crude works.

Bronson Alcott, Journal, November 2,1829:

The idea that half my life is gone and so little is accomplished worthy a mind and heart destined for such noble activities and acquisitions, overpowers me. But I soon rise and again plod on my way, hoping and regretting.

At The Growlery this month:

1. Newspapers
2. On the Abolition of Certain Words

Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), p. 72:

"Rock" is the music of slaves. Of adolescents pursuing the illusion of freedom and protest while the steel chains of technology bind them ever tighter.

The motto of Daniel Heinsius (1580-1655) was "Quantum est quod nescimus," "How much there is that we don't know."