The Logic of Long Distance

In the fascinating and perceptive  All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, Jennifer Senior takes a look at the cultural expectations surrounding parenthood, adulthood, and childhood. The book is fashioned out of a lovely mix of psychology, philosophy, sociology and real-world reporting, and while the drama of parenting is her ostensible subject, she uses this drama to explore even more fundamental questions. The book is not a manual for parenting; it's a book about the way we frame our lives and the narratives that support the answers we give to the hows and whys that face us down as parents and even as human beings. The most interesting claim that she makes in the book is that the pursuit of happiness at the center of contemporary culture, enshrined in the Constitution, and a central guiding concept in parenting--we want our kids, more than anything, to be happy--is deeply problematic and a threat to other, more important, more achievable, and more satisfying hu...

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. ...

The passage  below is an excerpt from Paul Goodman's "Applied Science and Superstition," written in 1951. It is both quaint and prescient. He gets the problem quite right, but sixty years later, the scale of the problem has been incredibly transformed: In the century-old debate between Science and the Humanities, the humanities are now a weak opponent. They are not sure of what they are and they do not seem to have much of use to offer; whereas science looms in the fullness of success, it has made new advances in theory, and its technological applications have transformed the modern world. Yet sadly, perhaps just because our humanities are so weak, we have been losing the basic humane values of science itself. Having lost our firm credulity about what man 'is' and what society is 'for,' we have become confused about what is relevant, useful, or efficient. Thomas Huxley and Thorstein Veblen were thinking of a 'scientific society' where people were...

We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live - by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody could now endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error. --Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 121 This moustache is even better than Nietzsche's. This morning I ran with two friends of mine. We've got a good eclectic group of runners here in Nashville from a variety of backgrounds. Our conversations are always winding and interesting, full of provocations and insights, rarely conclusive of anything. The running mind seems to skim from topic to topic rather than burrow in. One subject that we skimmed over today was my last blog post . One of my running partners, who happens to have a PhD in physiology, reminded me that I had finally cured my four-year battle with chronic achilles tendinitis by finding the right shoe (in this cas...

"...to a friendship of good men all the qualities we have named belong in virtue of the nature of the friends themselves; for in the case of this kind of friendship the other qualities also are alike in both friends, and that which is good without qualification is also without qualification pleasant, and these are the most lovable qualities. Love and friendship therefore are found most and in their best form between such men." --Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics "And yet. Isn't the main reason we love this sport because it gives us an excuse to idle away an hour (or more) a day with the other skinny social rejects talking about who knows what and god knows why all the while fooling the rest of the world (and, admittedly, sometimes ourselves) into thinking that what we are really doing out there is suffering mercilessly and ascetically towards some impossible goal?" --Some dude on a message board In a world in which facebook is reconstructing the concept of fr...

Aristotle, in the Physics , opposes the natural to the artificial. He says that natural things have "their principle of motion or of standstill" in themselves, whereas the artificial is dependent on something else for its "principle." Understanding what he means takes a little unpacking, but I think doing so will shed light on some current movements that are motivated by the idea of running more naturally. Aristotle describes the difference between the natural and the artificial using the example of a tree and a wooden bed frame. He notes that a tree's principle of growth is located within itself. It naturally follows the form of a tree, given the proper conditions, and it grows itself into a tree on its own. A wooden bedframe, notes Aristotle in one of the few moments of humor in his texts, will not grow into a bed when planted in the ground. In order that it take shape, the bed needs someone else to conceive of its idea. For this reason, we say that a bed i...

A typically morbid being cannot become healthy, much less make itself healthy. For a typically healthy person, conversely, being sick can even become an energetic stimulus for life, for living more. This, in fact, is how that long period of sickness appears to me now: as it were, I discovered life anew, including myself; I tasted all good and even little things, as others cannot easily taste them--I turned my will to health, to life , into a philosophy. --F. Nietzsch e In this short passage from his philosophical autobiography Ecce Homo , the last book he wrote before succumbing to insanity, Nietzsche gives us the story of how his philosophical vision was born. It is the product of a convalescence, the remainder of a battle for survival against the depression and physical pain that Nietzsche battled his entire adult life. He turned his will to health, to life , into a philosophy.  Indeed, Nietzsche is often proclaimed as a great philosopher of life, of power, of overco...

This week started off with a cold south wind and rain, our first days without bright sunny skies since we arrived in Paraguay. Asunción is not well suited for rain. Without storm water drains the streets fill with water, and the endless rush of buses tears through the puddles, soaking the sidewalk—and whatever unlucky soul happens to be making his way down the street. On Monday we ventured out anyways for a San Juan celebration in Shopping Mariscal Lopez, one of the big malls in Paraguay. Since the evening was rainy and cold, the celebration was moved inside to the parking garage, which filled the air of the garage and eventually the entire mall with thick smoke from the cooking food. The garage was packed with people, and I was reminded once again of the different ways in which we experience space. The Paraguayans were pressed together in a dense, smoky, noisy garage—as happy as they could be. For my sensibilities, it was a bit too much humanity. So we didn’t linger too long and ende...