Launched & cooked

LISTEN. "Resilience" launched impressively last night. It's the next step towards the era of commercial space tourism, beginning "perhaps as soon as late 2021" for those who can afford the fare. Low earth orbit will be an exotic place to visit, initially, and eventually an extension of the natural habitat we've taken too much for granted. It'll be our final frontier, though, if we don't change our lives. "If this pandemic has taught us anything it’s that we cannot escape the world we have shaped," Margaret Renkl observes.

Speaking of launching, and failing to launch...

Today in CoPhi we'll begin John Kaag's Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life. But then we'll quickly adjourn, to join the author's Zoom workshop on the book.

We're joining the workshop mid-stream, they've moved on from the opening chapter which begins to delineate the stark contrast between those on the one hand "whose existence is little more than a series of zigzags," whose "spirit wars with their flesh," who "wish for incompatibles," whose "wayward impulses interrupt their most deliberate plans," and on the other the "lucky ones," the 'once-born who came into the world as babes ready to embrace it."

William James was not lucky, not at least in that respect. He zigzagged well into his twenties, wrestling with feelings of indecision and profound doubts as to his capacity to marshal the will and perseverance to launch a life worth living. As we'll see, though, his discovery of now-obscure Charles Renouvier's thoughts about controlling one's attention and "sustaining a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts" was the start of his rebirth as a philosopher and liver of a life worth living. It launched him.

James would have deplored the fact that the 170-foot Hall in Harvard Yard built in 1963 and bearing his name has been a popular launch-point of a different sort, popular with sick-souled jumpers who couldn't find a cure.

But he'd have been pleased that John Kaag has written a book inspired by his discovery. "We will spin off this mortal coil soon enough. The task is to find a way to live, truly live, in the interim. William James can help."

In Environmental Ethics we've finished our assigned texts and will now crowd-source the subject matter of our remaining sessions. My suggestion for today is more Wendell Berry, alongside Michael Pollan.

I've just discovered a pair of instructive encounters between Berry and Michael Pollan, whose book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, is dedicated in part to Berry. Pollan writes: "If the environmental crisis is ultimately a crisis of character, as Wendell Berry told us back in the 1970s, then sooner or later it will have to be addressed at that level--at home, as it were. In our yards and kitchens and minds." The two authors conversed on stage in 2013 in Louisville. (I saw Pollan in Nashville discussing Cooked with Ann Patchett a year later at the Blair School, according to the notation in my signed copy.)

And here, just a few minutes into a panel discussion in California, Pollan credits Berry with teaching him that it is possible to pull weeds and cultivate a better harvest without offending the spirits of Emerson and Thoreau or sacrificing either nature or culture to the other.

Sick souls could do worse than cultivate a healthy interest in the culinary arts and their transformative power.

Pollan: “Cooking—of whatever kind, everyday or extreme—situates us in the world in a very special place, facing the natural world on one side and the social world on the other. The cook stands squarely between nature and culture, conducting a process of translation and negotiation. Both nature and culture are transformed by the work. And in the process, I discovered, so is the cook.”

Squarely between nature and culture is just where we must stand, if we're to address our environmental crises with character sufficient to effect the eleventh-hour transformation we so desperately need. Otherwise, we're just cooked.