Writer's Diary
3/16/26
Six years since COVID lockdowns and school shutdowns—the world of before.
It occurs to me that economic scarcity and simultaneous interdependence are partly at the root of so much acrimony in American culture among online natives, and that one of the reasons there was more looseness temporarily around 2021 was that the stock market was high and people had government checks, and so there was less inherent competition. With scarcity comes war, scourging, elimination of rivals.
I can never find any of the books in my apartment. The rule of thumb is, if I want to find a book, I won’t find it. If I forget about it, I’ll find it. Can’t find Emerson today, but I rediscovered Montaigne. I need something in that range. Wisdom.
Montaigne read the Stoics and admired their devotion to their principles and courage, and believed himself to be impetuous and unfocused, lazy by comparison. Five hundred years on, I find myself impetuous and lazy and unfocused, and Montaigne virtuous and stoic, and the Romans rather violent and mad.
A moral person, I think, is interested in experience, not books. An ethical nature is trying to fit a prefabricated view of right and wrong over the quantum, jostling, unstable, unreasonable reality.
“All the glory I lived for in my life is to have lived a tranquil one—not tranquil according to the standards of Metrodorus or Arcesilaus or Aristippus, but my own. Since philosophy has been able to discover no good method leading to tranquility, which has come to all men, let each man seek his own one as an individual,” Montaigne wrote.