The Thoughtful Spot's Glorious Return

Well, its return, at least...

Aug 01, 2023

This “news”letter has long stagnated. Its author discovered that the time (and word-count) commitments of a full-time writer make regular blogging quite difficult. Yet, like the ursid übermensch, Hank the Tank, The Thoughtful Spot has emerged from hibernation and will recommence its festivities — effective immediately.

As Albert Einstein never actually said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” So, this iteration of The Thoughtful Spot will include fewer original words. Its content will, nonetheless, merit the busy reader’s attention each Sunday morning. And its mission remains the same – to deal seriously with big ideas, old and new.

In Ordinary Times: The Costs of Bohemianism

Last week, this author forayed for the first time into arts criticism, publishing “Puccini’s La Boheme: The Costs of Bohemianism” at Ordinary Times. Giacomo Puccini’s operatic masterwork makes the sensible audience member wonder whether the Romantic, devil-may-care lifestyle deserves its unending romanticization.

These tragic heroes resemble too many of this twenty-something writer’s peers: happy to fudge their way through life’s difficulties, cut off voluntarily from institutions of civil society, and determined to mold the greater world to fit their personal tastes. Many kids, these days, eschew bourgeois life choices, only to bemoan confusedly the consequent dearth of bourgeois outcomes; and those who do achieve success walking the bourgeois walk too often refuse to talk the bourgeois talk. Many young folks’ plan financially to afford next month’s rent and thrice weekly UberEats orders, not good medical insurance or a mortgage. They frequent bottomless brunch on Sundays rather than Café Momus on Christmas Eve. Immediately available food, consumer goods, social, and intoxicants have eroded many young people’s tolerance for delayed gratification. Building discipline, like building a muscle, requires consistency and many repetitions.
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In sum, however, La Boheme’s audiences should understand its warning not as polemic against artistic endeavors or non-traditional lifestyles per se, but rather a reminder that such choices inevitably involve tradeoffs. Truly great art — which often emanates from non-traditional, not-so-balanced folks — is not only, well, great, but elemental to the human experience. Its creation requires individuals to decide non-rationally to pursue their wildest dreams. Some succeed, some fail. For some, artistic meaning and experiential pleasures compensates for financial stresses and other opportunity costs; for many, they do not. Years ago, a veteran opera coach, whose professional credits include the Metropolitan Opera, told this writer that if one can imagine pursuing happily a career other than music, one should.
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But most modern bohemians live listlessly for no cause but the avoidance of grown-up life’s unpleasant parts. They hazard the artist’s risks without hope for his payout.

Read the full piece here.

Some Wisdom

Human progress stems not from centralized planning, but from individuals’ freedom to capitalize on their hardwired propensity for productivity and coordination.

“This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.”

–Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

Some Beauty

Man springs out of nothing, crosses time, and disappears forever in the bosom of God; he is seen but for a moment, wandering on the verge of the two abysses, and there he is lost.
If man were wholly ignorant of himself, he would have no poetry in him; for it is impossible to describe what the mind does not conceive. If man clearly discerned his own nature, his imagination would remain idle and would have nothing to add to the picture. But the nature of man is sufficiently disclosed for him to know something of himself, and sufficiently obscure for all the rest to be plunged in thick darkness, in which he gropes forever, and forever in vain, to lay hold on some completer notion of his being.

–Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America