Philosopher Dien Ho suggests that life as a zombie might help us achieve some of our aims:
In some respects, the idea that becoming a zombie is a bad thing borders on a platitude. Zombies wander around in constant hunger in a semi-decomposed state. Their actions are guided entirely by impulses. They seem to lack the complex cognition that’s critical for most of the activities we consider worthwhile – social interactions, intellectual pursuits, personal projects, etc. But in other respects, the life of a zombie has characteristics many of us strive mightily to achieve. Their lives are highly centralized and simplified, since their needs and wants often revolve around just a few things, like brains or human flesh. They are largely indifferent to pain and suffering. Short of severe head injuries, zombies enjoy a type of immortality. Zombies do not care about most of the pesky concerns that fill our daily lives: they do not care about the weather, their appearance, their social status, their retirement plan, their morning commute, and petty office politics. They are not concerned about the threat of terrorism, floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes. And they certainly do not become jealous, depressed, worrisome, or suffer the other anxieties that regularly plague our waking moments. Indeed, if we focus on just these qualities, the life of a zombie resembles the ideal state of a disciplined Zen Buddhist monk who has managed to let go of his earthly concerns.
On Walt Whitman’s birthday, a little poem:
And who art thou? said I
to the soft-falling shower,
Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer,
as here translated:
I am the Poem of Earth,
said the voice of the rain,
Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land
and the bottomless sea,
Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely form’d,
altogether changed, and
yet the same,
I descend to lave the drouths, atomies,
dust-layers of the globe,
And all that in them without me were seeds only,
latent, unborn;
And forever, by day and night,
I give back life to my own origin,
and make pure and beautify it;
(For song, issuing from its birth-place,
after fulfilment, wandering,
Reck’d or unreck’d, duly with love returns.
Professor Christy Wampole notes that the essay form has become very personal:
Essayism consists in a self-absorbed subject feeling around life, exercising what Theodor Adorno called the “essay’s groping intention,” approaching everything tentatively and with short attention, drawing analogies between the particular and the universal. Banal, everyday phenomena — what we eat, things upon which we stumble, things that Pinterest us — rub elbows implicitly with the Big Questions: What are the implications of the human experience? What is the meaning of life? Why something rather than nothing? Like the Father of the Essay, we let the mind and body flit from thing to thing, clicking around from mental hyperlink to mental hyperlink: if Montaigne were alive today, maybe he too would be diagnosed with A.D.H.D.
The essayist is interested in thinking about himself thinking about things. We believe our opinions on everything from politics to pizza parlors to be of great import. This explains our generosity in volunteering them to complete strangers. And as D.I.Y. culture finds its own language today, we can recognize in it Arthur Benson’s dictum from 1922 that, “An essay is a thing which someone does himself.”
Anyone who has read even a little bit of science fiction is familiar with the idea of one of the most ominous threats to space exploration: the idea that an astronaut will lose his mind and attack other astronauts or destroy the mission itself. It’s a real enough threat that NASA is developing technology to prevent emotional meltdowns before they happen. Katie Drummond reports:
NASA is conducting its own research on the issue. Last week, the agency handed out a $1.3 million contract to psychologists at Michigan State University to further the development of a psychosocial sensing “badge” that astronauts would wear during their mission to the red planet. The pocket-sized badges, says project leader Steve Kozlowski, PhD, will be designed to track physiological markers of an astronaut’s psychological health — like blood pressure and heart rate — as well as the dynamics of their social interactions. “You can never ensure that nothing bad will happen,” Kozlowski said. “But a coherent means of assessing interactions and stress … is one way to protect against any negative outcomes.”
According to Mental Floss, yes:
Almost every syllabus, teacher and standardized test points to the ubiquitous No. 2 pencil, but are there other choices out there? Of course.
Pencil makers manufacture No. 1, 2, 2½, 3, and 4 pencils—and sometimes other intermediate numbers. The higher the number, the harder the lead and lighter the markings. (No. 1 pencils produce darker markings, which are sometimes preferred by people working in publishing.)
The current style of production is profiled after pencils developed in 1794 by Nicolas-Jacques Conté. Before Conté, pencil hardness varied from location to location and maker to maker. Earliest pencils were made by filling a wood shaft with raw graphite, leading to the need for a trade-wide recognized method of production.
Writing in the New Yorker, Sam Sacks argues that debates about enduring literature are less about the artistic merit of the work and more about the social issues they raise:
A look through the Classics section of bookstores—in America or any of the Western democracies—bears out de Tocqueville’s instincts. The offerings are wide-ranging, tilting toward diversity and inclusion. But, more to the point, artistic brilliance is no longer the most important determining factor. What makes a classic today is cultural significance. Authors are anointed not because they are great (although many of them are) but because they are important.
In other words, the current criteria for classics are more a matter of sociology than of aesthetics. That’s why prose-toilers like George Orwell and Aldous Huxley are securely fixed in the canon while masters such as Frank O’Connor and Eudora Welty could easily be left out. “1984” and “Brave New World” are embedded in the weave of language and history, but what does Welty have going for her apart from stylistic perfection? Henry Miller survives—and will continue to survive—because the country once found him shocking enough to censor. (Likewise, D. H. Lawrence might very well be a footnote if not for “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”) There’s better prose in the average issue of Consumer Reports than in most Upton Sinclair novels, but “The Jungle” triggered actual legislative reform and will therefore last as long as the United States does.
