Thoreau as Runner: Some thoughts on "Life Without Principle"

Here is the last paragraph of Thoreau's "Life Without Principle." It's a little long -- Thoreau takes his sauntering seriously -- but worth the attention:

Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body. They are infra-human, a kind of vegetation. I sometimes awake to a half-consciousness of them going on about me, as a man may become conscious of some of the processes of digestion in a morbid state, and so have the dyspepsia, as it is called. It is as if a thinker submitted himself to be rasped by the great gizzard of creation. Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite halves, — sometimes split into quarters, it may be, which grind on each other. Not only individuals, but states, have thus a confirmed dyspepsia, which expresses itself, you can imagine by what sort of eloquence. Thus our life is not altogether a forgetting, but also, alas! to a great extent, a remembering, of that which we should never have been conscious of, certainly not in our waking hours. Why should we not meet, not always as dyspeptics, to tell our bad dreams, but sometimes as eupeptics, to congratulate each other on the ever-glorious morning? I do not make an exorbitant demand, surely.

It is easy for the runner to see the influence of Thoreau's habitual walking (or "sauntering" as he preferred to call it) on his philosophical orientation. I do not want to reduce his philosophy to the fact that he was a walker, but I also do not want to minimize the role that this simple human activity might have taken in developing his philosophy. There is wisdom in regular movement. I'll put it like this: the title of this essay might as easily been "Life Without Walking."

Thoreau's profession was surveying, but he made his living with the less precise great art of  sauntering.

Thoreau never really tells us what his Principle is. He simply notes the absence of principle in so much of living. The absence is noted in a specific effect: namely, too much remembering of the underbrush of life -- politics, routine, gossip. The unprincipled life is the life that lets its consciousness be dominated by things that might be made into unconscious habits. In other words, the unprincipled life is the life that wastes effort on things that ought to require no effort -- and therefore squanders this most precious of human resources.

A life of principle, then, is a life that conserves effort for the things that are worthy of effort. To be principled is not so much to be hardworking or to live one's life according to a rule. To be principled is to recognize the relationship between effort and choice, to deliberate on this relationship, and to take responsibility for it. We often confuse being principled with having a rule for choosing and applying it. But of course rules and values can be applied without any application of intelligence. The difficulty is not in possessing or acquiring a principle or values, but in being principled. These are two different things entirely.

I want to think that this notion of life without principle and the relationship between conscious and unconscious effort came to Thoreau as he was walking. As we runners know, the act of running itself is mostly unconscious. The habitual runner has trained himself to do a thing which would require immense effort and concentration for the non-runner. A ten miler for the well-trained runner is a chance for his mind to wander and reflect, a time for genuine companionship among a select crew, a time for escape from busyness and routine. We do not have to reflect on how to move our legs, on the pace we need to run, or even on the route we take. Such reflection would make the run worse, not better. Many a good run, even the best runs, have slipped underneath my feet without any consciousness at all -- the road simply stretching out, my legs simply churning, my feet lightly falling, my chest gently heaving, my heart beating as always.

It's paradoxical, but true -- the well trained runner can forget his body in ways that the non-runner must remember. Being in shape is a feeling almost like being disembodied. The body runs on its own; we reach the runner's grail: the tireless state, the unconscious body. This is such an exhilarating feeling because the mind is then liberated to float freely above and beyond. Having acquired the unconscious habits of the runner, we are in many ways liberated from the body.

My sense is that Thoreau knows this feeling from his daily walks and uses it as a critical threshold for this, his most concise and direct philosophical statement. A principled life would be one in which we have become well-trained in the underbrush of life such that we can perform the routine tasks of daily life almost unconsciously, saving the precious resource of effort for more noble endeavors. As the well-trained runner lives in his body, using his attention and effort only to keep it on the path and to get it out the door, so would the principled life save its attention and effort for its larger and wider vision, avoiding getting bogged down in the thistles and muck of petty politics.

In many ways the discipline of a principled life is the opposite of the pale shadow that goes by "discipline" in education -- where we teach students that discipline is about the effort of completing the daily assignment. The goal ought to be to produce the sorts of people who can handle the the daily assignment with little effort at all. Then, effort, the stuff of life, can be directed towards more expansive projects, like poetry, philosophy, love -- the things of genuine value.

Such discipline would look almost exactly like the discipline of the well-trained runner, who manages to smile and even laugh at paces that would make the rest shudder. This laughter is the mark of a principled life: not dyspeptic sacrifice but eupeptic joy.

A Hard Memory

I want to talk about John Freeman today.

On a horribly beautiful April morning, not unlike this Monday, the top runner and team captain of the cross-country team that I coached was hit by a train and killed. Running had saved his life before he lost it. As a ninth grader, like many, John had been struggling in school. The running helped him with his attention, and it gave him an identity at the school. By his senior year, he was one of the school's best athletes, an honor roll student, and had been accepted to a top university in the Northeast. He was going to try to walk-on the team.

When I heard of the bombing at the Boston marathon, thoughts of John surged up from the deep places.

The memories are too clear. His family invited me to the hospital to say goodbye before they stopped the respirator. I stood there with his mother and his father and thought of how the runner's heart in his chest continued to beat blood through his damaged brain. Running had made me a part of his family. The next summer, the hottest summer I remember, his father and I laid out a XC course through the school. We lined it with flat sandstone that we hauled on a rickety trailer from Crab Orchard. It felt good to work and sweat, but not as good as running with John. This was almost a decade ago.

It's a cliche, but we repeat it anyways: we don't know what we've lost until it's gone. I didn't realize how powerful my connection to John was until my knees buckled when I heard the news. I didn't know how deeply I could be affected by an athlete until I tried to speak about him to the school in the days after his death and found that my voice could not sound.

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/

On Monday afternoon, the running community felt some of the power of our connection. We all shared a common experience: that of the possible loss of our friends. Some of us experienced real loss. Those of us who avoided that real loss on Monday were brought to reflect, as I do now, on other losses that we have experienced.

As I sit here overwhelmed by the reception of the piece I wrote on Monday, its themes come back to me. Vulnerability. Exposure. Pain. Endurance. Love. Risking being open. -- and how those things are the essence of non-violence. One of the things that I love most about running is the feeling of moving with a stripped-down body across open ground. We do feel exposed when we run, and I think that's somehow wrapped up in the freedom we feel when we do it.

Acts of terror exploit this freedom. Their consequences almost always result in the erection of walls, monitors, checkpoints. These are physical reactions to basic human vulnerability and the way it exposes us to risk--and to each other, and therefore unfortunately to the possibility of violence.

The pain I felt when John died was truly awful. By becoming so close to him, by allowing our lives to intertwine, I unwittingly exposed myself to trauma. I don't like to revisit that pain, but sometimes it visits me. When it does, I try to remind myself that this pain is the mark of companionship, even though it doesn't feel like it. Not at all.

A Bomb Is the Opposite of a Marathon

Runners are more than familiar with pain. It's our bread and butter. We love to hurt. We believe in endurance, in suffering, in brutal and soul-withering work.

But ours is not a violent sport.

See, there's a difference between pain and violence. Violence violates. You see it so clearly in what happened today. The morning showed pain as triumph and pain as failure. The suffering carved out on the face of Dulce Felix (what a sweet name) as her legs no longer worked, as her glory faded into defeat, as the marathon gods smote her for believing too much, for wanting too much, was noble suffering. The suffering of loss, but sensible loss, human loss. This sort of loss was not a violation because all it risked was victory -- such a small thing in the grand scheme. Sweet happiness led the race, and then faded. Such is life. It requires endurance.

With Jeptoo we saw strength overcoming pain. We saw her, after 24 miles of hard running, run harder. We saw the glory of a healthy body at the peak of its talent, at the peak of its performance. We saw what can be, sometimes, in rare moments: a life almost without limits. A picture of fragile triumph.

The Boston Marathon is, in many ways, a celebration of human effort. We come together on Patriots Day to remind ourselves of the joy and pain of work and effort. Everyone who has taken the marathon seriously knows that to make your peace with the marathon means learning to love the grind over the result, the pain over the triumph, and the hard push over the finishing time. Marathoners embrace these things because in a race so long, there are few perfect races. Doing well is always just that: doing well. We never do our best, but we do enough. That's what endurance means.

That would have been lesson enough. But when two blasts rung out around 2pm, running experienced violence. We were violated. Those two blasts introduced pain without effort. Suffering beyond endurance. A bomb is quick, thoughtless, grotesque, impatient, unfeeling. It's all externality, no internality. All destruction, no training. All noise, no silence. All damage, no strength. A bomb is the opposite of a marathon.

We opt for violence when we can no longer endure the difficulty of living with others, the difficulty of recognizing our limits, the difficulty of being vulnerable ceaselessly to pain. To endure is to keep going in spite of those limits and the pain of life. To endure is to expose ourself to the world, to others, to the ravages of time and effort. To endure is to risk loving, to risk being loved. A marathon doesn't always have to symbolize this. Sometimes it is just a race that runners run. But this year it is more -- it is a symbol of endurance.

A bomb is the opposite of a marathon.

Tomorrow, despite the bombs, we will be running. We will be afraid, but we will not fight. Or rather, we will fight by not fighting, by choosing flight, we runners, we believers in endurance.

Blocked Up a Bit

I had been on a good run of posts -- a couple years I really hit my goal of writing weekly, but for the last month I have just not really been feeling it in terms of the old blogaroo.

I think there's a lot of good content on the blog, so I hope you will keep browsing through, maybe re-read a piece or two. I make no future promises about the blog for now: I hope to return posting more frequently.

Here's a quick one for the road.

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"In the writings of a hermit one always hears something of the echo of desolate regions, something of the whispered tones and furtive look of solitude; in his strongest words, even in his cry, there still vibrates a new and dangerous kind of silence -- of burying something in silence. When a man has been sitting alone with his soul in confidential discord and discourse, year in and year out, day and night; when in his cave -- it may be a labyrinth or gold mine -- he has become a cave bear or a treasure digger or a treasure guard or dragon; then even his concepts eventually acquire a twilight color, an odor just as much of depth as of must, something incommunicable and recalcitrant that blows at every passerby like a chill."  --F. Nietzsche

All runners have something of a hermit in them. Our moods and thoughts while we are out on the run take on the exact twilight color that Nietzsche talks about. You will notice this most on the days that others wouldn't run, as they head wherever it is they are headed, they buzz around with plans and goals and directions that the runner, if he looks inside, finds pretty much absent.

The rhythm of the footfalls, the exposure to the weather, all that concrete, all that asphalt, the eyes turned so often out to the horizon, the countless early mornings, that old friend the dull and persistent pain, the circling and circling around, the endless quiet, the ever-open road -- all of this affects us. Why wouldn't it? Eventually it works its way up through the soles of the feet into and through the stringy calves and lean hamstrings, rising up through the heaving chest and settling into that large and unsettled runner's heart.

You'd think it would make us hard and stoic, and it does in some ways. What happens most with us, though, is not a matter of hardness or toughness or any of the things that folks typically think of runners, as they see them from the outside. The effect of all that running is to whittle the soul down to a sensitive core. Unlike the rest of the world which seems to literally sparkle with the bright flame of ambition, the runner's world is a deep orange and glowing ember. Having chiseled so much away in those miles, having spent so much time with ourselves, we feel our own presence so much more deeply than the rest. Ours is a slow burn.

All that time spent with ourselves gives us too much trust in our own law, our own life, and perhaps too little trust in others. Like all things too well known, our own soul becomes hard to communicate to the others. We become detached, the hard law of our athletic life gives us an angle on the good life that makes us unable to fully participate in the Good Life that the rest seem so eager to pursue.  So we become the sort of people that have been glorified too much in American Literature, too little in American Life. We become like Kerouac, "surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving [is], and how good it [feels]. The world ... suddenly rich with possibility.”

Morning or afternoon vagabonds, whatever our pleasure, instead of racing headlong with the rest of the insane towards all the bullshit, we make a simple choice to head away from it. And we head out running, with hearts that are fuller and heads clearer for it. We are the people born to move, to move and never to bustle, to move and never to arrive.

Once out the door we find ourselves surprised by just how easy it was to leave. Surprised to find a home out there on the concrete and in the blustering wind and on legs that don't tire, where you might least expect a home to be.

Oscar Pistorius, Sport and Life

Rod Dixon

"Happiness is the activity of the soul expressing complete virtue." -- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

"All I want to do is drink beer and train like an animal." --Rod Dixon, great Kiwi runner


Last night I watched the great sports documentary The Two Escobars. It's a must see for anyone interested in the intense and troubled relation between sports and society. In a prior post discussing the Lance Armstrong case, I wrote that part of what made his case so enthralling and ultimately tragic is the blurring of the lines between sport and life.

The Two Escobars tells that tale again, marking over and over again how the clean, crisp, well-refereed, and meritocratic space of the soccer field provided escape from the turmoil and violence and uncertainty of Colombian life. Then, how awfully and inexorably, the value of that space as a moment of escape became so great that it was consumed by the very forces that it initially was created to escape. No one could control Colombia without controlling soccer, but that control was valuable and possible only if soccer were free. As soon as it became clear that soccer was subject to the same forces that it was trying to escape, the whole game was ruined.

These thoughts of the great and necessary tension between sports and life were in my head when I heard the Oscar Pistorius news, and so my reaction to the story has been colored by them. Here we have a man who is in many respects using sports as a vehicle for social change. He was using the great lever of sports to push society in new directions. This push was controversial from the outset, as the lever of sports only works through the purity and fairness of sports, and there were a lot of questions from the beginning about whether Pistorius' prostheses gave him fair or unfair advantage.

No matter which side you came down on in this debate (for the record, I tended to follow Science of Sport's view that Pistorius' advantages were unfair), it was impossible to ignore the difficult questions that Pistorius raised about the nature of fair play and the access of the disabled to sports. How, for example, is it possible that we are talking about a double amputee actually being advantaged in sport?! Pistorius troubled and continues to trouble the concept of what counts as a "natural" body, an unaided performance, and he was simultaneously inspiring and controversial for this reason. Whether he won a medal or not was almost immaterial -- his success transformed the culture of track and field and opened questions that cannot so quickly be forgotten. He was intent on forging new ground in sport, and like most great people who move social opinion, he did not wait for opinion to settle -- he was committed in his view, defiant even. That's really admirable.

And now, of course, this awful event and tragic event. His girlfriend shot 4 times on Valentine's Day at 4am in his own home, with his guns. A charge of premeditated murder.

What does this have to do with The Two Escobars? Or with the Aristotle and Dixon quotes? The idea that keeps flashing before my mind is that the virtue that sport develops is not complete virtue. Sport demands a narrow sort of virtue. It asks us to be single-minded, goal oriented, fixated, stubborn, confident. These qualities are only amplified in elite athletes, and perhaps more so in elite athletes who are not only trying to be successful at their sport, but to strike at its most basic foundations.

The point that Aristotle was making was that human happiness requires the development of all of our capacities. Athletics, even at its best, requires the intense development of many virtues, but precisely because of its artificial nature it does not require the full development of human virtue. Athletes like Andrés Escobar, Meb Keflezghi, Bernard Lagat, Leo Manzano, and maybe even goofy old Ryan Hall remind us that it is possible to have the fuller human virtues while being an athlete. But this tragedy that has happened to Pistorius, the woman he shot, the people who loved him, remind us that the athletic virtues are not fully overlapping with the human virtues.

The Rod Dixon quote is telling. In the end, sports is escape from a real and both over- and under-civilized world into an artificial world where we can forget the world, drink beer, train like animals, become more animal. That escape gives us a place to practice, to train, to develop habits, to return to the world refreshed. It can give us the leverage on life to live better, sometimes. But happiness, as Aristotle reminds us, has to be won in the full contest and context of an entire life.

For Pistorius's family and friends, this story, I'm sure has more angles than I could ever know. Maybe no one will ever know what happened last night, outside of the fact that two lives were ruined. The life of Oscar Pistorius has long ago been reduced to a narrow fable for the public. The meaning of this fable has now made an odd turn. Having been a symbol for the broadening of the meaning of and access to sport, he has now become a symbol of the narrowness of sport in relation to life.

We are left holding the two worlds of sport and life together, trying to piece them back together, as if they were supposed to fit, as if anything really ever fits, as if the rules made sense, as if the referees were unbiased, as if there were any rules at all.

The Self-Monitoring Fallacy: Reflections on Self-Knowledge

“We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge - and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves - how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?" So begins Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. I happen to be teaching this book now, so I am re-reading it for perhaps the fourth time, and like all great books, it deepens and expands with each re-reading.

Nietzsche has many targets of criticism in the Genealogy, but the one that he mentions first is our relationship with knowledge. One of the fundamental goals of philosophical reflection (or maybe we should just say plain old thinking) is the old Socratic dictum: "Know thyself." Self-knowledge is a key to good living. In order to achieve what makes us happy in life, we need to know at least at some basic level what makes us happy.

Ouch!

But the self turns out not to be so easy to know. There are any number of impediments to self-knowledge, and you don't need a PhD in philosophy to know the primary obstacles. Three come to mind off the top of my head:

1) Change. The self like all living things changes, and it does so in two fundamental ways. We change as we pass through life stages. As a child, we want to play. As a teenager, we want to be an adult. As an adult, we want to be a child, etc. And then we change in respect to the situations we are in. We learn to be different selves in response to different situations. In the end, this means that self-control looks less like knowing yourself and acting out your goals, and more like governing a city filled with different selves that have to be constrained and released in different situations.

2) We don't like what we see. Hence the lesser known but perhaps more true Socratic dictum: "Self-knowledge is a bitch." Here we are getting closer to Nietzsche's project in the Genealogy. Part of the reason we remain unknown to ourselves is that what we find when we turn the gaze inwards is sometimes repugnant to our sensibilities. A primary criticism that Nietzsche launches against the philosophical self-scrutiny that comes before him is that none of those philosophers were actually looking at human beings in all of their emotion, embodiment, animality, violence, pain, fear. Instead, philosophers were only interested in knowing and outlining the details of the ideal self -- the self that is the rational controller of its destiny. The self who disinterestedly pursues knowledge, the good, and God. The self that loves harmony and peace rather than chaos and disruption.

3) The knowledge-relation is an inadequate self-relation. This is Nietzsche's main point, and it's sorta subtle. You can't know yourself in the ways that we know other things because as soon as we make the self into an "object of knowledge" and set out to study it, we've already lost the sort of genuine relationship with the self that would be necessary for self-knowledge. The reason for this is that the self is not a thing, it is an activity. Once the self is abstracted from the projects it engages in and made into an object of knowledge, it's no longer a self.  The self, for Nietzsche is a relation in the making, and to look at it from the point of view of the knowledge relation is to disengage it from all other sorts of relations and make it do one narrow thing: engage in knowing. This is how we can arrive at the Cartesian myth: cogito ergo sum. I think therefore I am: nothing could be further from the truth.

When we look at the self from this point of view, we do indeed get the philosophical view of the self as a sort of truth-seeker or knower. But -- and this is the most important point -- the knowing self is just a fragment of the self that we are. There are many other aspects of self-hood that essentially and necessarily escape the knowledge relation. Who we are is really the sum of our relations with things, with people, with our prior acts of self, with our job, with our religion, with our body, and with what we know. Not seeing those other aspects of self-hood is committing what Nietzsche's peer William James calls elsewhere "the philosophical fallacy." To commit this fallacy of thought is to assume that when thinking philosophically we have a pure view of the truth, when really the perspective of philosophical reflection is merely that: a perspective, one among many others.

Nosce te ipsum?

A similar fallacy occurs with runners who use technology such as heart rate monitors and GPS watches and even training logs to monitor and "know" their running better. We might call it the "self-monitoring" fallacy, and it is subject to the same problems as the philosophical fallacy. These pieces of training equipment do not objectively monitor a pre-existing body. Instead, just as the philosophical gaze presents a certain type of "thinking self," technological monitoring presents a certain type of body -- namely the body as quantified field of data. When we read the data that is produced from this monitoring, we do indeed know our heart rates and paces and the like, but the thing that we know when we read that data is actually only a small fragment of the runner's body that has been abstracted from many other possible relations. It is one perspective among its many relations.

Just as the self is more than -- and fundamentally different from -- its knowledge relations, the runner's body is more than -- and fundamentally different from -- the quantified self that is produced by these instruments of measure. Running, like all rich activities of life is just that: an activity. It's a set of relations and undergoings that are mixed up and tangled with all of life's relations. The attractive thing about geeking out over training data and logs (and believe me, I am prone to do this) is that it presents running as "free" from all of these messy things. In precisely the same way that the philosophical idea of the self as rational, controlled, and naturally good-seeking, it presents training as a neat matter of science, a question of inputs and outputs that can be controlled and monitored from without. Attractive? Sure. False and narrow? Yep.

Philosophers catch all sorts of flak for being detached and out of touch with the reality of life's problems. Much of this flak is well-deserved, as is verified by a cursory glance at the lastest professional journals. But the hazards of our profession are not unique. In a specialized world, we are all subject to increasingly narrow connections and perspectives that in turn produce false and narrow world views.

Running, seems to me, can be a practice that resists such specialization. Beyond the geekery, the training plans, the tactics and strategies, we can find running as a broad practice that we do with others. One that not only loosens the legs and the chest and sets the heart to new rhythms, but also gets us outside, exploring space, our local towns and communities. It allows us to feel the weather. It gives us time for bull-shitting with friends, or for doing the hard work of introspection. Occasionally, it allows us the sense of power of using the body as a well-honed tool.

And, yes, okay, it also lets us indulge our inner training geek. I'll give you that. But be careful of that guy. He has a tendency to use the certainty of his knowledge to erase all of the uncertainty of life. It's that uncertainty, that wildness, that openness, that keeps us out there. Not just training. Running.

How to Get in Shape

"...the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in the history of the globe." -- R.W. Emerson, "Experience"

Not belief, but the impulse to believe.

Not our precious and polished knick knacks of thought, cluttering the house of the mind. Not the desire to be happier, faster, fitter. Instead -- the gut that yanks us out, over and against the plans of our better selves.

Not the goals that we have, not the PRs we've run, but the thrill in the neck, the ache in the hamstrings, the sideways glance to hold him off, or to die.

Not the workout on paper, not the feeling of completion. Not the endless entries in the training log. The sand in your shoulders at the end of a race. Not the setting of the alarm clock, not the morning coffee. The weak winter sunrise, the breath in the air, the wet and frozen dew.

Not the training philosophies, not the books and coaches and blogs and message board bull. Not the miles per week, not the workouts. The grind, the fire, the slump, the legs that won't go.

Not the things you tell your friends and your family. Not the things you tell yourself. The things you can't say, the things that can't be said. The things you don't even know you could say. Not the shoes, not the clothes, not the body, not the mind. The beast, the bird, the antelope.

Not the selves we know, not the people we are. The bones, the grit, the dread, the relief.

Not religion, not argument, not logic, not truth. Acid, ache, stomach, heart.

Not belief, but the impulse to believe.