I have lately found myself in a grand funk. The condition is well described by a sentence at the very beginning of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn: “There was nothing I wished to do which I could just as well not do.”

This doesn’t happen to me very often, and when it does I can never quite figure why. It descends upon me and envelops me, like a dense fog. This time it may have had something to do — I can’t say for sure — with a project of mine. I have been gathering the reviews I wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer with a mind to making a selection of them for an eBook.

I think of a book review as a kind of consumer report. I try to give the reader an engaging account of my reading experience. I don’t aim either at high art or profound criticism, just something worth about five minutes of the reader’s time that may help him figure out if the book under review is one he might like to read.

So far, in gathering up my reviews, I haven’t come upon any that I thought were bad, and a few I’ve come upon have struck me as uncommonly good. Most are decent and workmanlike.

I have spent nearly half a century writing book reviews. For a few years I was writing one every week. It’s actually a pretty pleasant way of earning a living and it’s something I had wanted to do since I was in high school. But last week I was working on one that was not going very well. Ordinarily, I would just keep hammering away until I got something that would at least do. But not this time. I can’t say I suddenly lost faith in what I had done all those years, but I had certainly, for the time being, lost my enthusiasm.

This grew into the aforementioned grand funk.

My wife is away on the annual trip she takes with her sister to the Outer Banks. Ordinarily, I make dinner for us, because I like to cook. I even like to cook for myself, usually. But not this past week. It was easier to eat a bowl of cereal in the morning than make an omelet. Since I live off the Italian Market it was easier to have a cheesesteak for dinner than make something.

Understand that my practice is to go with my moods. You can learn as much from a grand funk as you can from anything else.

I would try to read, of course, but nothing held my attention. I would flick on the TV, channel surf for a bit, then give that up. I would take a walk, but I wouldn’t go very far, and when I got back I’d feel just as lackadaisical as I had before I left. I managed to do the things I had to do, like put out the trash on Wednesday, but not much else.

I did bestir myself to attend the Philadelphia Orchestra’s concert presentation of Richard Strauss’s opera Elektra last night, and that was indeed thrilling. Maybe that’s what got me to resolve that, today, I would try to shake off this mood of boredom that had itself become intensely boring.

For that, I realize, is what a grand funk comes down to: being bored.

Of course, I woke up this morning feeling the same as I had the day before and the day before that. But in my mind I could hear some lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who seems to have experienced grander funks than I ever have. They were from “Carrion Comfort” — “… I’ll not … cry I can no more. I can; /Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.”

I hadn’t written a column for a couple of weeks because I hadn’t got an idea for one that seemed interesting, which is to say that I hadn’t come upon a quotation lately that had especially grabbed me.

But every day, on my blog, as I mentioned in my last column, I have a feature called “Thought for the Day.” So this morning I decided to search through those and see if I could find one that ignited a spark of interest in me.

I did. It is from the novelist Frederick Buechner (who is a Presbyterian minister):

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

Hopkins’s sonnet, which I looked up and read in full, made plain to me that my grand funk was a flirting with despair:

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man

In me …

Small wonder the phrase “not choose not to be” is the one that I heard most clearly on awaking this morning. And small wonder Buechner’s quote grabbed me tightly when I came upon it.

I had got into a mood of wanting everything to be fine and dandy all the time in every way. Routine things that have to be done every day — making the bed, brewing coffee — seemed annoyances for some reason. I wanted that review I was having trouble with over and done with. Only I didn’t want to have spend my time writing it.

Buechner’s point — and I hope I never forget it — is that there are no downsides to being alive. Even a grand funk can prove a blessing.

I have a daily feature on my blog called Thought for the Day. It’s the first post every day, always scheduled for 9 a.m. Usually, it’s a quote from someone who was either born on that date or who died on that date.

Recently, the quote I chose was from psychiatrist Thomas Szasz: “People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.”

Fellow blogger Georgy Riecke posted a comment later that day saying only, “Or steals.” Later still, I responded to Georgy’s comment: “The way great poets do, according to Eliot.”

I was alluding to a fairly well-known passage in Eliot’s essay on the English dramatist Philip Massinger in The Sacred Wood:

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.

Naturally, this got me to thinking about the only self I have first-hand knowledge of, my own.

I started wondering if I had found myself, created myself, or stolen myself. My considered opinion is “all of the above.”

But the least important factor seems to have been the creative one. The self you arrive at is a kind of collage, and the creativity involved has to do with discerning what bits and pieces may be of use and figuring out how to fit them together.

I suppose that the earliest sense of self comes from the feeling you get as to how others regard you. I am certain that the foundation of my own sense of self came from my mother.

I have mentioned before that, while I am not much of a fan of Sigmund Freud, I have always felt he was on to something when he said that “a man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.” That “feeling of a conqueror” is a bit much, but I am pretty sure that your mother’s unconditioned love serves to powerfully propel you through life.

Eventually, of course, you find yourself exercising creative control over your self. I think I have mentioned before in this column that my own self seems to have coalesced when I was about 15, in February 1957, when I first read Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.” The bright sunlight of that day in February fills my mind even now as I write about it more than half a century later.

Given my working-class background, it was inevitable that I would have to steal a lot to arrange myself into anything presentable. The nuns of the Society of the Sacred Heart taught me how to speak properly. They also had a wonderful way of equating morality with etiquette (“gentlemen and ladies just don’t do that”).They also made it clear that people will judge you by your manner of dress and grooming (my wife once remarked that I paid more attention to my nails than she did).

In fact, I would certainly not be who I am were it not for the nuns and priests who saw something in me and encouraged me in intellectual pursuits.

But I was also a loner, which is more of an advantage than you might think. The person who can stand apart from the crowd elicits a certain respect from the crowd. And while I was no genius, I was smart enough, and I had no problem helping those of my fellow students who were less capable than I, and who proved grateful for my help.

I spent a lot of time during my high school years going to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and just strolling about. It was the beginning of a lifelong habit of just looking at paintings and sculptures in galleries and museums. I didn’t seriously read about art until long after I had first looked at a lot of it.

Books gave me lots of clues, of course. Who were these fellows Mozart and Bach and Beethoven one kept reading about? Luckily for me, there was at that time in Philadelphia a very good classical musical music station, WFLN. So I was able to combine being a first-generation rock-and-roller with a growing knowledge and appreciation of classical music.

All of these elements went into becoming the person I happen to be. You will notice, though, that the things I have been talking about have been mostly props and costumes. So you may wonder: What has any of this to do with finding or creating oneself? It sounds more like outfitting someone for a stage play.

Well, how one speaks and dresses and comports oneself, the books one reads and the music one listens to, one’s pastimes, are all outward signs of who one is. I don’t know if  you can only get to know yourself by means of such, but I do know that I have only been able to know myself by such means. Agere sequitur esse. Action follows being. You are what you do. Since you choose to do what to do — even if, as Georgy would have it, you have to steal ideas from  others as to what to do — what you choose to do is what defines who you are.

Shakespeare may have exaggerated a bit when he said that “all the world’s a stage,” but there can be little doubt that each of us is playing a role of some sort.

“All men’s miseries,” Pascal says, “derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”

Now as it happens, I have spent quite a lot of time alone during my life, usually by choice. I like being alone, always have.

But being alone and sitting alone in a quiet room are not the same thing. I certainly spend enough time on my posterior in front of a computer, and before that in front of a typewriter, and before that with pen and paper.

But I have always punctuated that by getting up from time to time and walking around or lying down.

As a matter of fact, I have never been sure about that business of sitting in a chair. It’s easy to see how our miseries could derive from that alone.

Chairs can be wonderful, but my preferred item of furniture has to be the bed. I can spend the day all alone propped up in bed — or on a sofa. If you’re reading, you can pause, lean back a bit, and think over what you’ve read. You can put the book down and make a note.

Or you can stop reading altogether and start sketching in your head something you may want to write about. If words and ideas and images really coalesce, then you get up and write them down — after sitting down by yourself in a quiet room.

My feeling comfortable alone seems to be a fundamental characteristic of mine. When I was a child I never minded having to play by myself, and in my teens I spent many a day hiking by myself through Pennypack Park (which was a lot wilder then than now).

So what was Pascal getting at? Just antsiness?

I don’t think so. It’s one thing to be by yourself doing something, quite another to be by yourself, period. I think the image one needs to conjure to envision what Pascal was getting at is being by yourself in a room empty of all but one chair in the middle, white-washed walls, tile floor, a room like the one Dante was said to sit in while composing verse, where he would stare at one of the walls, listening for the music of the words as sound and sense interpenetrated one another.

Of course, there are other, less edifying ways to picture it. It could be an interrogation room and one is sitting there preparing one’s defense.

Probably the best image is that of a monk in his cell, “sitting quietly, doing nothing,” to borrow a phrase from Basho.

But being alone can never be enough … by itself. It has to alternate with action, movement. You have to get up and do something — sweep the floor, or draw water, listen to the catbird sing, notice the splash of the frog jumping into the pond.

Such is the alternating current of being. And so, from time to time — when we are, as it were, suspended between the idea and the act — we may just find ourselves catching a glimpse of what it is behind it all.

I don’t know if many Americans these days are familiar with Charles Péguy. He was one of those strange figures that seemed more common around the turn of the last century, a time of considerable intellectual and social turmoil. Looking back, the ideas being debated at the time — anarchism, neo-scholasticism, spiritualism, among many others — seem less interesting than how idiosyncratically they were regarded by those debating them.

Péguy was both a socialist and a nationalist. He was an also ardent Dreyfusard. He died shortly after World War I broke out, in September 1914, shot in the head the day before the Battle of the Marne started.

He was also devoutly Catholic, though in a distinctly odd manner. He believed, but did not practice — though he did manage to revive the custom of making pilgrimages to shrines on foot.

Perhaps it was the oddness that gave him his provocative insights. “The sinner is at the very heart of Christianity,” Péguy said. “Nobody is so competent as the sinner in matters of Christianity. Nobody, except the saint.”

This is profoundly Catholic, and in a profoundly Catholic way, though you are unlikely to hear it preached from a pulpit anytime soon.

Most people, you see, do not amount to much as sinners. They may break one or another of the Ten Commandments from time to time, or even habitually, but they do so unreflectingly. Not good, but not exactly sin, either. To commit a sin you have to know what you’re doing, that while it may be proscribed, you’re doing it anyway. And though you freely choose to do it, you nevertheless agree that it is wrong to do.

Another Catholic, the composer Francis Poulenc, born around the time Péguy was flourishing (in 1899) practically embodied the tension implicit in this outlook: “You know that I am as sincere in my faith, without any messianic screamings, as I am in my Parisian sexuality.”

You will note that, in its proper form, this is far removed from Puritanism. It is more nearly a kind of connoisseurship (the term connoisseur derives from a Middle French word that has to do with being acquainted with something).

I think that is why Catholic novelists — Graham Greene, say, or Muriel Spark, or François Mauriac — have proved so good at limning the inner space of character. They do not see the person as a product of causation, but as one who acts out of deliberate motives, who risks the consequences of transgression, and for whom the search for God is the search for a judge who can free them from their self-condemnation.

I suspect that most Catholics, especially nowadays, do not read or think about their professed faith enough to be much affected by this. I, however, find it bracing and always have. But then, I am of an earlier generation and have thought and read quite a lot about it. It’s probably why — I think it was right after I left college — that I once saw Ingmar Bergman’s so-called theological trilogy (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence) three times in one week.

These films are usually described as dark, but I found them exhilarating. They were about people for whom life was a high-stakes drama, not a launching pad for a career.

The crucial question for most people, I suppose, is whether any of this outlook is true. But the very raising of the question implies a particular idea of what is true and what isn’t. If you think that science is where you go to get at the truth of things, then such an outlook will not impress you. It may even appall you.

But I would argue that this is to misunderstand science, which is about getting at the facts. Those facts may then be used to arrive at truth, but facts and truth are not the same thing. Indeed, the fact that there are more and better novels derived from the religious perspective than from the perspective of naturalism may be evidence of the former’s truth. Such novels, it seems to me, offer better hypotheses for explaining life as it is lived than any novel that I know of grounded in naturalism.

Bear in mind that experience is always true to some extent. The viewpoint I have described has shaped the way I experience the world and life. Even were naturalism right, and the reason I feel this way is because a chain of causation reaching all the way back to the Big Bang makes me feel that way, the feeling would still be there, the necessary effect of that causation. I thought to add “for whatever reason,” but there is no need for reasons in a naturalistic world. Things just happen because they are caused to happen by whatever happened before in the chain of causation that is what we really happen to be.

Richard Dawkins gets all bent out of shape because so many people — to couch it in terms he might recognize — are religious chains of causation. Of course, if he’s right, he can’t help himself. That’s just the way he’s been caused to be.

I suppose one principal objection I have to Dawkins’s viewpoint is aesthetic: Not only does the religious perspective make for better fiction, it also makes for a more interesting way of life. Of course, — again, if Dawkins is right — I can’t help thinking the way I do anymore than he can help thinking as he does. Luckily for me, the way I think leads me to presume I can actually make up my own mind.

I don’t know if anyone today remembers Walter M. Miller Jr.’s post-apocalyptic novel A Canticle for Leibowitz. It won the Hugo Award for best science fiction novel in 1961.

I was introduced to it the year before by my college freshman Latin teacher. I haven’t looked at it for more than half a century.

Recently, though, while searching for something to post on my blog as a “thought for the day,” I came upon a quote from it: “You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.”

Now, one of the things I’ve found about riffing off quotes, as I do in this column, is that a quote that intrigues you will often just stop you dead in your tracks. “Hey,” you say to yourself, “that’s something to write about.” Immediately, though, you realize you don’t know where to start. It is a peculiarly tangible mental state. Your mind is suddenly a vast open space and the quote you’ve come upon is like a bell whose single clang keeps resonating there.

The only thing I find I can do is make note of it, let the clanging subside, and escort the quote to the back of my mind.

But a funny thing tends to happen not long afterward: I come upon something that seems to have bearing on that quote I shelved. That happened with the quote from A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Not long after I posted it, I happened to pick up a copy of the philosopher Josef Pieper’s Death and Immortality. I had read it some years back, but can’t say I retained any clear memory of it.

Pieper discusses this business about our being souls inhabiting bodies, and that at death soul and body separate. He quotes theologian Karl Rahner as saying that this way of putting it is “used so naturally that we must regard it as the classical description of death from the theological point of view.”

Pieper (1904-1997) was a Catholic and a Thomist, and he does not think this view is precisely correct. He objects to the view that the soul and body are two separate entities and that the soul is the true man. Were that so, then death would be an illusion, since the real me, my soul, would be unaffected. It would just go off by itself.

Pieper will have none of this. The man dies, he points out. The separation of soul and body is a tearing asunder of a man’s being. He quotes Thomas Aquinas: “The soul united with the body is more like God than the soul separated from the body, because it possesses its nature more perfectly.” We are, in other words, composite beings, made up of body and soul. Without a body we are not ourselves.

This seems reasonable to me. I doubt if any of us can conceive of life as a disembodied spirit. I certainly can’t.

Pieper, of course, believed in Original Sin, but he points out that this is not an exclusively Christian doctrine, citing Aristophanes’ speech on Love in Plato’s Symposium: “You understand nothing about Love, [Aristophanes] says, if you do not consider what has befallen the human race — by which, as it then turns out, he means principally the primordial fall of man, his loss through guilt of his previous wholeness.”

The upshot of this is that death makes sense, not as something natural, but as something condign: a just punishment for a grievous transgression, “the proper existential response” to which is “to think of the badness of death in conjunction with the still greater badness of the previous fault, and freely submit to the punishment.”

I mention all this, not to argue in favor of it, or to object to it, but simply because I think it is so different from what we usually hear on the subject. Oh, ask any practicing Christian if he believes in Original Sin and he will likely answer in the affirmative. But will he have ever seriously thought about the meaning of what he claims to believe? I think that is less likely.

Believers are quick enough to defend their faith when it is criticized, but are often slow to examine the implications of it.

Christians are, in fact, not distinguished by their belief in an immortal soul. What distinguishes Christianity from other faiths (there may be exceptions, but I don’t know what they are) is the belief in the resurrection of the body, on the grounds that the soul is not itself without a body.

The question of whether this is true or not seems secondary to me. The primary question would seem to be, “What exactly can this mean?”

I suppose most people have heard “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” sung by the drug dealer Sportin’ Life in George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. The song voices doubts about certain passages in the Bible. But the title phrase is applicable to a range of assumptions well beyond that.

It is, for example, widely assumed that Earth cannot possibly be the only life-bearing planet in the universe, given how vast the universe is and how many planets there must be. In fact, of 2,326 planets so far spotted by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, 10 are said to be about the size of Earth and orbiting their suns in what is called a “habitable zone.” Kepler-22b in particular looks promising. Temperature there seems to be around 72 degrees and it circles a star much like our sun.

I don’t really get emotionally engaged by this. It’s fascinating either way.

But if there’s anybody out there like us, they sure have been hearing from us for a bit. We’ve been transmitting radio waves their way for decades now. But they don’t seem to have called back.

That doesn’t mean they’re not there, however.

C. S. Lewis wrote a space trilogy involving Earth, Mars, and Venus. Mars, it turned out, was called Malacandra by its inhabitants, and it was a world that had never fallen from grace, in the sense that the Abrahamic religions posit that mankind did. Perelandra, as Venus would come to be known to its inhabitants, is portrayed as facing trial, the outcome of which will be whether it is fallen or not.

Well, obviously an unfallen world would be wary of making contact with a fallen one. And another fallen one like ours could prove highly problematic. Its inhabitants might actually be worse than we are and more intelligent and technologically advanced. Bad news for us.

I find the opposite theory more interesting. I am fascinated by the possibility that we are the only things like us in all the world. Maybe it takes an entire universe to come up with anything like us, inconsistent and contradictory, at odds with each other and ourselves, smart and mean, needful and grasping. Maybe we’re the sour cherry on the sundae.

Or maybe we’re just perspective figures — those little humans placed in a lower corner of a landscape painting in order to give the viewer some sense of the height of the waterfall those little people are standing in front of.

I think that theists are especially comfortable with this. After all, God, being himself a singularity, would naturally create something singular, something once in eternity. And he wouldn’t have to mull over possibilities, or try out different models. That’s one of the perks of being omniscient.

There is something else to consider: This presumption that we are not alone is grounded in false humility. If we are alone, and there is no God, then we are a fluke, pure and simple, and that offends our vanity. That we, wonderful we, should be the merest accident cannot possibly be the case. And so we piously recite our solemn credo that we are not alone.

We do, as noted above, have some evidence that there are other places like our own. There is, however, no evidence at all that anybody lives there.

My last column served up a modest proposal regarding the philosophy curriculum, suggesting that larval philosophers supplement logic with the experience of making meatloaf.

I’d like to continue in that vein with a further suggestion: That they try to arrange, from time to time, to fill in for the janitor.

I am not being frivolous.

The other day I spent a couple of hours putting our patio garden into order for the winter. This involved a lot of sweeping, an exercise that almost magically brings mind and body into coordination, the body being occupied just enough to keep you from trying to take control of the mind. This allows the mind to be itself, namely, something we ought to listen to rather than manage. What you get while you’re sweeping is a satisfying physical sense. There’s a rhythm and a tempo that you have to discover — but when you do, you find yourself just watching and listening to the content of your consciousness. That consciousness is a dimension of yourself every bit as substantial as the physical. But the two are not identical. And neither one is yourself.

What we take to be ourselves is the current alternating between the two.

Anyway, small wonder so many Zen tales relate of someone achieving satori by sweeping up or being told to sweep. For there is, as I have tried to suggest, an almost wondrous fusion of mind and body while sweeping (maybe this is where women used to derive their wisdom, back when women were wise). Discover the way to comfortably sweep, and you can keep it up forever, maybe even long enough to reach infinity.

All this comes about, strangely enough, because, when mind and body work in balance, you stop thinking about things. You are simply aware of them. The hesitant, deliberative you has disappeared.

We think that to think means to determine the course of our thought. But suppose to think means simply to pay attention to what is going on and let whatever intelligence one has process the information so provided without interference from others and, maybe most of all, ourselves. In other words, just see what’s going on.

You won’t see what is going on if you subscribe to accounts of what is going on provided by anyone else. You can learn a lot from other people, but only if what they tell you turns out to be true, and you can’t know that unless you have, all by your lonesome, developed the habit of paying attention, for no particular reason, to whatever happens to be going on around and in front of you.

The key is to bring nothing besides yourself to the encounter. Especially leave behind your ideas and theories. Ideas are wonderful, and theories can be. But trouble starts when the idea about something starts getting in the way of the thing itself.

C.S. Lewis has written something that seems oddly pertinent to this: “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”

This is not unlike the Zen saying to the effect that if you cup yours hands gently together, you can raise water to lips and drink, but if you clutch the water, it just spills onto the ground.

In other words, we tend, throughout life, to try too hard. We also tend to operate on the assumption that the way to solve any and all problems is to figure them out intellectually. Actually, if you stop interfering with your mind, and just take up a broom and sweep the patio, you may discover that your mind has figured it all out for you already.

W. H. Auden says somewhere — I believe in one of the essays gathered in The Dyer’s Hand, which I do not happen to have at hand — that he preferred systems of irregular measurement. In other words, inches, yards, and ells to, say, the metric system.

I share that preference, principally because such irregular systems do not pretend to a precision that is in fact unattainable.
Consider the circle.

 Its circumference is arrived at by multiplying pi by the circle’s radius squared. But pi is an irrational number whose decimal representation can neither come to an end nor repeat. It can be expressed only approximately. Given that a key factor in arriving at the circumference of a circle is itself an approximation, it would seem to follow that the circumference of a circle can only be known approximately. Just one more thing we can’t quite be certain of. (Since the ancients knew this, I wonder if that is why they thought of the circle as an emblem of perfection, its ultimate unknowability being analogous to God’s.)

Pi is also a mathematical constant. It figures in a lot more formulae than the one for calculating circumferences. Since it is, fundamentally, an approximation, it follows that whatever solution arrived at by means of it can only also be an approximation. An exceedingly close approximation, of course, but an approximation nonetheless. Not precisely accurate.
I happen to think that it is precisely because they are, however slightly, imprecise that such calculations accurately reflect reality, which I happen to think cannot be precisely grasped. In fact, it is real because it cannot be precisely grasped, which is another way of saying that it is, to ever so slightly paraphrase e.e. cummings, a world of born and not a world of made, something alive and not constructed.

No living thing can be reduced to mere quantity. That is the delusion of scientism, as opposed to science. For the scientist, quantity is a means to an end. For the scientistic, it is an end in itself.

You will no doubt be surprised to learn that these cosmic lucubrations of mine are but the prelude to a discussion of some things ostensibly much humbler — soup, stew, and meatloaf.

Recently, I posted on my blog an account of my having improvised a soup, in the course of which account I remarked parenthetically that “I have long thought there is something in common between putting together a good soup or stew and arriving at an authentic, personal philosophy.” To which my friend Lee Lowe, also a soup aficionado, responded: “… soup is usually tasty, and a great way to get kids and now grandkids to eat vegetables. But I can’t say it’s helped me to arrive at an authentic personal philosophy. Sadly.”

So I think I should explain what I meant.

When I was in my 20s, I had some time on my hands and thought I would figure out exactly what it was that I was sure of, to serve as the basis for my procession through life. I know now that this not only sounds ridiculous, but was ridiculous. But in those days, having just put college behind me, I was more enthralled with pure reason than I have been for a long time.
I got nowhere with my project, because every time I tried to decide what I was sure about doubts cropped up. The desire for precision is a correlate of the desire for certainty and both are really cravings, not simply desires, and both, I think, derive from lacking a sense of nuance. It’s sort of like wanting to be hip.

Wanting to be hip is a powerful indication that hip is what you are not. The authentically hip are never deliberately so. They’re just people who have a pretty good sense of what’s going on, have their own idiosyncratic take on it and go with it. There are, at any given time, a fair number of such people around and, since they all have a sense of the same thing — what’s going on — their individual takes on things tend to have a lot in common. So they get noticed. And the next thing you know, there are, say, a bunch of young women sporting long hair and black turtlenecks sipping espresso in coffeehouses, as was the case in the ’50s. I remember them well — if only because I lived with one for nigh on 20 years.

The next thing after that, of course, is a story about them in the Timesstyle section, by which time the style is becoming passé (one reason why people who rely on the Timesto find out what’s going on tend to be so unhip).
The thing about soup and stews and meatloaf is that they turn out best when the cook doesn’t rely on recipes and measuring cups and spoons Recipes are a fine source of ideas. I read them all the time. As for measuring, when I cook a soup or a stew, I use a glass I have that is shaped like a chalice, and I never quite fill it up. I pour an amount that looks good. I also eyeball the amount of herbs I add. I pour into the palm of my hand an amount of salt that looks about right. I gauge the texture by stirring (or, in the case of meatloaf or meatballs, from mixing the ingredients by hand). I always make sure to put in less of an ingredient than may be needed, because I can always add more. But I can’t subtract if I’ve put in too much.

These are all culinary commonplaces, and any experienced cook, reading the preceding paragraph, will probably say to himself, “Wow, no kidding?”
So what does any of this have to do with philosophy, authentic or otherwise?
Well, philosophy has come to be thought of primarily as an intellectual undertaking, an arrival at an understanding of things by rational means alone. It’s like trying to cook something by strict attention to a recipe and careful measurement of ingredients. Both techniques are too abstract.
The most important detail in what I just said about cooking a soup or stew is that bit about tasting as you go along. In cooking, as in life, it’s experience that counts. It also counts in philosophy. Experience is the only way you get a feel for things, which is what tends to be lacking in a purely intellectual understanding of them.

I almost always find myself thinking philosophical thoughts when I cook, and they tend to be among the most tolerant and humane thoughts that I have. Cooking may not make me wise, but it does give me some feeling of what it might be like to be wise, to have a sense, not of the measurement of things, but of their many and varied nuances.

And that, to conclude, is why I think philosophy majors would do well to punctuate their courses in logic by endeavoring to turn out a flavorful meatloaf or minestrone.

Have you heard the latest neutrino jokes?

Here’s one:

Neutrino.

Knock, knock.

And here’s another:

“We don’t allow faster-than-light neutrinos in here,” said the bartender.

A neutrino walks into a bar.

Don’t get them? Well, in a Wall Street Journal column, physicist Michio Kaku put it this way:

Physicists fired a beam of neutrinos (exotic, ghost-like particles that can penetrate even the densest of materials) from Switzerland to Italy, over a distance of 454 miles. Much to their amazement, after analyzing 15,000 neutrinos, they found that they traveled faster than the speed of light—60 billionths of a second faster, to be precise. In a billionth of a second, a beam of light travels about one foot. So a difference of 60 feet was quite astonishing.

Cracking the light barrier violated the core of Einstein’s theory. According to relativity, as you approach the speed of light, time slows down, you get heavier, and you also get flatter (all of which have been measured in the lab). But if you go faster than light, then the impossible happens. Time goes backward. You are lighter than nothing, and you have negative width. Since this is ridiculous, you cannot go faster than light, said Einstein.

In other words, in neutrino jokes the punch line comes before the setup.

I happened to be thinking about this the other day when I looked up and noticed a flock of pigeons flying over the Italian Market. Not that pigeons have much — or anything, so far as I know — in common with neutrinos. No, what came to mind when I saw the pigeons was augury, the ancient practice of gauging the divine will by studying the flights of birds.

What a different way of regarding the world! And, before you brush the notion away on the presumption that our ancestors were all damn fools, remember that this was common practice among the Romans, those guys who built aqueducts and roads that are still in use today. People whose practical skills hold up very well against our own. Hardly damn fools.

To the extent that the flight of birds interests us nowadays, it has to do with the how and the why of it. We do not think there is any meaning to be discerned in it. Early man seems to have felt otherwise. But then, early man had a different, more direct connection with nature than we have. He seems to have drawn less of a distinction between himself and the rest of things.

We, on the other hand, have come to think of things in terms of quantities and parts. We weigh and measure things, take them apart, see how they work, and think that tells us all we need to know about them.

But is anything ever just the sum of its parts? Do the parts not work together in synergy, achieving thereby an effect none of the parts could independently?

In Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of, which I reviewed, Barnes buys into a notion of materialist determinism that I think may have some bearing on this. He says that “far from having a whip to crack, I am the very tip of the whip itself, and what is cracking me is a long and inevitable plait of genetic material which cannot be shrugged or fought off.” Later he quotes a “specialist in consciousness” who said on the radio that “these words coming out of this mouth at this moment, are not emanating from a little me in here, they are emanating from the entire universe just doing its stuff.”

I wrote in my review that the upshot of this was that we were all but end-points of chains of causation reaching back to the Big Bang and that upshot of that was that no viewpoint could be considered either right or wrong. Each just is.

But thinking this over recently, I realized I should have followed the chain in the other direction, back to its source. For if we have a sense of self, it must be because a sense of self is inherent in being, going back all the way to that Big Bang. And that brings to mind this, quoted in John Blofeld’s Taoism: “From the Tao all the myriad objects derive their being, their illusory separateness being wrought by the interplay of yin and yang.”

If this be so, it is not the sense of self that is illusory, but the sense of separateness. And if that is the case, early man’s failure to draw a sharp distinction between himself and the rest of the world may not be so strange after all.

Remember that the next time you notice a flock of pigeons.

This year marks the centenary of the great Polish poet, Czeslaw Milowsz, who won the Nobel Prize in 1980. To mark the event, Cynthia Haven of Stanford University has put together a collection of essays called An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz. Contributors include Seamus Heaney, Helen Vendler, W.S. Merwin, and Robert Pinsky.

I’ve only just read Haven’s introduction, “From Devenir to Etre,” and one passage in particular has grabbed and held my attention. Ten years ago, Haven interviewed Milosz at his home in Berkeley, Calif., and asked him about être and devenir. His reply was evasive: “My goodness. A big problem.”

And so it is. It has to do with the Ur-question of Western philosophy, posed and pondered by Parmenides (“what exists is uncreated and imperishable, for it is whole and unchanging and complete”) and Heraclitus (“the only thing permanent is change”): How reconcile the one and the many, being and becoming, essence and existence, être and devenir? Parmenides and Heraclitus do not really disagree. Heraclitus simply insists that the nature of being is dynamic, not static, that it is a process, not a thing, something on the order of what his older contemporary Lao Tzu called the Tao (for Heraclitus it was the Logos).

Milosz eventually does get around to talking about this: “We are in a flux,” he tells Haven. “We live in the world of devenir. We look at the world of être with nostalgia. The world of essence is the world of the Middle Ages, of Thomas Aquinas. In my opinion, it is deadly to be completely dissolved in movement, in becoming. You have to have some basis in being.

“In general, the whole philosophy of the present moment is … the complete undoing of essences, of eternal truths. Postmodernism consists in denying any attempt at truth.”

For whatever reason, this brought to my mind something Meister Eckhart said, which I recently posted on my blog: “There exists only the present instant … a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.”

This in turn brought to mind, by way of contrast, Krishnamurti’s notion that what is happening right now has never happened before and will never happen again, which is why we call it “new.”

For Milosz, obviously, the issue underlying all this is not merely academic, but vital. Failure to engage it undermines values, which is another way saying that it deprives us of our humanity, our essence, that ingredient of being that makes us who we are.

But that essential humanity must be something rather different from our ordinary, everyday humanity. For that humanity is the one enamored of rules and regulations, given to drawing up shopping lists of do’s and don’ts, always on the lookout for the moral equivalent of paint-by-numbers.

So, while I am at one with Milosz in deploring “the undoing of essences,” I can’t quite agree with the sharp distinction he draws between being and becoming. That “present instant” Eckhart speaks of is like the vast and always-moving, ever-changing ocean, wondrously placid one moment, dangerously violent the next, able to take us from continent to continent, equally able to destroy cities.

There are no cut-and-dried rules for living. Most of us know without having to think about it what would be really wrong to do. We need techniques, not rules. A note-perfect reading of a score does not make music. That comes from proper phrasing, just the right tempo, a bit a rubato here, a trill there. These can be taught and learned, but cannot be notated.

I also think that Milosz is right about postmodernism, that it “consists in denying any attempt at truth.” But the undoing of essences is a consequence of this, not its cause. The postmodernist apprehends neither being nor becoming. He apprehends only ideas. He is, as Beckett puts it in Ohio Impromptu, “buried in who knows what thoughts … profounds of mind buried in who knows what profounds of mind, or mindlessness, whither no light can reach, no sound.”