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Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others (New York: Other Press, 2016) delivers a masterful blend of biographical details and ideas. Fantastic! This is already my favorite ever book on the Existentialists and their "fellow travelers" -- and I haven't even finished reading it yet.
You want just a little bit of Søren Kierkegaard or Friedrich Nietzsche to get you in the mood? Check out Chapter 1: "SIR, WHAT A HORROR, EXISTENTIALISM!"
Additional teasers: "The topic of philosophy is whatever you experience, as you experience it" (page 16). You think about things, don't ya? You do live beyond making pitter patter, right?
Sarah Bakewell: "I think philosophy becomes more interesting when it is cast into the form of a life. Likewise, I think personal experience is more interesting when thought about philosophically" (page 32).
And how about that time when Jean-Paul Sartre wanted to experience the effects of mescaline in the 1930s? "The results were dramatic. While [Aldous] Huxley's drug adventure would be mystical and ecstatic . . . Sartre's brain threw up a hellish crew of snakes, fish, vultures, toads, beetles, and crustaceans . . . For months, lobster-like beings followed him just out of his field of vision, and the facades of houses on the street stared at him with human eyes . . . (page 99).
Seriously, comrades, anyone seriously interested in these folks and their experiences and ideas would, or will, love this book.
Onward!
Today's Rune: Defense.
I'm happy, pleased and proud to have fulfilled another long-standing goal in my life's quest: reading the complete essays of Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), a beautiful set, 1045 pages in Frame's translation, very rooted in Montaigne's times but also in classical Greco-Roman antiquity, a double bonus.
Montaigne has a very contemporary feel. One can easily imagine having a conversation with him in the 21st century; nor would he be surprised by much today even though more than 400 years have passed since he completed his life's work. Montaigne is the epitome of humanity in our most thoughtful and self-reflective moments.
"Any topic is equally fertile for me . . . Let me begin with whatever subject I please, for all subjects are linked with one another."
-- Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journals, Letters. Translated by Donald M. Frame. New York, London, Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Everyman's Library 259. Pages 810-811.
My philosophy exactly, the primary rationale behind "Erik's Choice."
Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.
Michel de Montaigne's (1533-1592) father employed "a system . . . to keep a journal and insert in it all occurrences of any note . . . A record very pleasant to look at when time begins to efface the memory of events, and very well suited to get us out of perplexity: When was such and such a thing begun? When completed? . . . Our trips, our absences . . . the receipt of happy or unhappy news . . . such
matters . . ."
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters. Translated by Donald M. Frame (Everyman's Library 259. New York: Knopf, 2003), page 201 (from essay 35).
Truly digging the writings of Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). He is like a conduit between the present and his time of some 400-500 years ago, and between his time to the classical writers of "antiquity" (notably Roman and Greek). Dig into Montaigne and you pick up a lot that is of enduring relevance.
"Put into his head an honest curiosity to inquire into all things; whatever is unusual around him he will see: a building, a fountain, a man, the field of an ancient battle, the place where Caesar or Charlemagne passed . . . He will inquire into the conduct, the resources, and the alliances of this prince or that. These are very pleasant to learn and very useful to know."*
*Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters. Translated by Donald M. Frame (Everyman's Library 259. New York: Knopf, 2003), page 139 (from essay 26).
Pictures from an exploration of New Orleans' French and Spanish quarter.
How to pronounce Montaigne? Here's a link.
Today's Rune: Breakthrough.
