The Logic of Long Distance

"Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. "I do not know which of us has written this page." --J.L. Borges, "Borges and I" The above passage is an excerpt from one of my favorite philosophical essays, "Borges and I." I like it because it's short! But also because it accurately portrays the relationship between identity and forgetting. Borges describes how the true self operates not through memory,...

Philosophers worry about most everything, but one of their favorite things to worry about is the relevance of philosophy to life. At a recent conference blogging was brought up as a way of connecting philosophy to "life." While this thought reminded me that I have been neglecting this blog and is part of the reason I am posting today, it also made me wonder a bit, as philosophers do, just what was meant by "relevant to life." If a blog is what gets you closer to life, then you must be pretty far away to begin with. Which means of course that you are not in life at all. This is actually a strange thought, but it is also true. We are always alive, but we are not always in life. So what is this thing called a life? Deleuze says this: "A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss." A life is thus that which has no outside. It is pure immanence: that which refuses to judge or reflect or act from a position that ...

Talking about the weather is one of the things that human beings are wired to do. Weather has two features that make it great as a conversational piece. First, weather is shared, not personal--we live in it together. Second, the weather is nobody's fault. It's a guilt-free topic of conversation, one of the few left. In ancient times, almost every event was like the weather. It was seen outside of the frame of human responsibility. The gods controlled almost every aspect of life and we stumbled around here below, buffeted about by their arbitrary actions. While this way of framing the world seems perhaps naive and infantile to the contemporary mind, it was also liberating. People didn't have to choose sides. It wasn't BP's fault or Obama's fault or the Republican's fault or the media's fault. It was just fate, no guilt. The world's events--love, happiness, social harmony, war, death, sickness--were the result of complex and superhuman circumstances be...

The last three weeks, I've started to feel my fitness move as I've gotten into the flow of training. The emphasis has been on maintaining volume (91, 93, and 88 are my weekly mileage totals), staying within myself, and being consistent. I probably violated that principle a bit this week with a couple of spontaneous tempo runs that left my legs a little tired. But hey it feels good to feel good. Aside from those two steady runs, most of my training has been easy running, between 7:15 and 7:45 pace. I've run 4 workouts and a 5k race (16:35) over the three weeks. Nothing too intense, mostly high-end aerobic surges and moderate efforts with plenty of rest. Everything up to this point has been mainly preparatory for more intense training later this summer. One element that I've added has been more consistency with strides. I've been doing them 2-3 times a week, and I've noticed over these few weeks that they've gotten easier and I've gotten more fluid and a b...

"Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung." --R. W. Emerson There exist two types of runner, broadly speaking. The first type of runner is essentially passionate . This sort of runner's primary desire to run stems from the immediacy of running. For him or for her, running is a means to maximizing the intensity of lived experience. Impulsive and somewhat wild-eyed, the passionate runner tends to express the meaning of running aesthetically and to theorize his running as the cultivation of perception of bodily states. It is the experience of running, first and foremost that animates the passionate runner. When this runner competes, he thinks very little about the watch but instead measures his feelings, eyes his competitors, looks to strike at the precise moment. He cares more about winning than about times, more about running than training, more about joy than sacrifice. The second sort of runner is essentially disciplined . Methodical and relentless, thi...

Another week in the books. Key Workouts: 8 x 1:20 hills 14 mile steady run w/surges 88 miles in 10 runs This week I'm starting to feel strong. I've had a month straight of regular progressive training. I've gotta be careful not to start pushing now that I'm feeling good. Steady as she goes. Throw away the lights, the definitions And say of what you see in the dark That it is this or that it is that, But do not use the rotted names How should you walk in that space and know Nothing of the madness of space, Nothing of its jocular procreations? --Wallace Stevens, "The Man with the Blue Guitar"

A passage from the runner-philosopher George Sheehan: ...[we] should be educated in the good life and how to attain it. In that, the athlete provides a much better model than the scholar. The athlete restores our common sense about the common man. He revitalizes old truths and instructs us in new virtues. However modest his intellectual attainments, he is a whole person, integrated and fully functioning. And in his highly visible pursuit of a highly visible perfection, he illustrates the age-old advice to become the person you are. Simply by being totally himself, the athlete makes a statement that has profound philosophical, psychological, physiological, and spiritual implications. Philosophically, the athlete gives us back our bodies. No matter what the Cartesians say in the classrooms, the playing fields tell us that we do not have bodies, we are our bodies. "I run, therefore I am," says the distance runner. Man is a totality, says the athlete, and forces us to deal with t...