Still Educating Sam Hasler: TGIF?

Out on the Town This Afternoon

I caught the bus close to 11 am for the grocery, thinking the worst problem of the day had been a pain in my left thumb. The shopping went well. I thought I had missed the #3 bus, but it came a couple of minutes after I stepped out of Payless. I had three plastic bags of groceries. When the #5 dropped me off, I thought I had left with all three. Nope. Well, I had to get the key updated, which meant I needed to go to the office to pay rent. That done, I got in and found the number for MITS and called about my bag. The next trip brought me my bag. One problem solved.

I walked down to McClure's and got my supply of Coca-Cola. Getting ice from the office, I was told housekeeping was on its way. I put away my groceries and waited outside. Time I used to make calls. One to the attorney about dad's trust and a call to Ms. Radwick about my manuscript. I talked to the attorney and left a message for my typist.

In the afternoon, I did some reading (see below) and had a few more texts with my sister. I decided a nap might do away with my headache. Once again, an hour became ninety minutes. Tomorrow I am sleeping in, it seems I need a bit more rest than I thought.

Up around 5:30, I fixed a little dinner and started on my pretrial detention journal.

Having got a bright idea, I called CC and then my sister. Cc promised to be up tomorrow, I explained the problem with my typist and my solution. What is that solution? To give her up, to recreate the piece of my manuscript she still has. Whatever her difficulties are with communications – whether she doesn't want to deal with the likes of me or she has lost the manuscript – her behavior has gone beyond the unbusiness-like into the rude. Time to wash my hands and get on with my work. CC will do some typing on my pretrial stuff. My sister may be able to help, too.

I have scheduled the posts for Sunday until 11 am. The next set of notes is too long for how tired I feel right now. Up in the morning and finish off Sunday.

Evening Reading:

Thomas Reid's common sense method by Robin Downie from The Scottish Review. I am trying to think of a general audience American publication that publishes a column by a philosopher about philosophy. I cannot think of any.

Common sense principles possess 'the consent of ages and nations, of the learned and unlearned, [which] ought to have great authority with regard to first principles, where every man is a competent judge'. Common sense principles are common sense because they are common to humanity.

The point that common sense principles are 'common to humanity' is important in Reid's interpretation of common sense. He frequently emphasises empirical generalisations from observable data about what people believe and how they behave. For example, he writes: 'The universality of these opinions, and of many such that might be named, is sufficiently evident, from the whole tenor of human conduct, as far as our acquaintance reaches, and from the history of all ages and nations of which we have any records'.

The Scottish Review's cartoon page.

And you might learn a bit of rugby (I did) from Word of the week: Try!

In prison, I ran across Muriel Spark. Hers was a name I had read of and discovered the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Ah, Maggie Smith!) was based on her novel. The prison library had Spark's Memento Mori, which I recommend. Which is why I spent time with The Scottish Review's Muriel Spark: by birth and formation. Some points from the review might explain why I find her interesting, one writer I wish I could get back to reading, and how she might apply to us out in Middle America:

Yet the concerns she has open up, for us, a wider and deeper theme that pervades Spark's work – her interest in what underlies human action, in the many ways in which human beings deceive themselves and each other, how individually and institutionally we create fictional narratives, and what this seems to tell us about the elusiveness of the truth.

We know, for instance, that for all her self-confidence, Miss Brodie's understanding of the world and of human affection is shaped more by fantasy than realism, that the narrative being written (in Loitering with Intent, a novel about a novel) by the central character is both true and false, and that Memento Mori is as much about the symptoms with which the characters die as about they way they believe they will live forever. Shifts in time and place, and refracted angles on the central task of story-telling, add a rich oblique feel to these novels.

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Spark herself wrote a revealing essay called Nevertheless in the New Statesman in 1961, reproduced in Paul Henderson Scott's Spirits of the Age: Scottish Self-Portraits (The Saltire Society, 2005), in which she highlights how life seems full of contradictions. The word 'nevertheless' catches the way she feels – an exile from Scotland yet carrying rich Scottish memories (above all about the Border Ballads) in her imagination; how she feels she belongs to Enlightenment Edinburgh in her wish to be rational about human sentiment and motivation; and above all how she regards religion itself as a place of 'paradox of belief'.

'Nevertheless' (and its cognate word 'however') give an important clue to her instinct to qualify, modify, distance herself from, respond sardonically to, and openly satirise traditional versions of religion. At the very end of Curriculum Vitae, for instance, after hearing praise for her early novels, she wryly says that it's always risky to be carried away with success – 'for many first novels are followed by duds. However, I took great heart from what he [Alan Maclean] said, and went on my way rejoicing'.

I have italicised 'however' confident that, like 'nevertheless', however is a characteristic way (both for Spark and all Scots) to distrust what seems to be too good to be true. Spark's answer to the questions 'do you see yourself as a Catholic writer?' or 'do you see yourself as a Scottish writer?' would almost certainly be 'yes and no', qualified by plenty of 'nevertheless' and 'however'.

What is more Midwestern than distrusting what seems to be too good to be true?