(abandoned substack draft – this one I’ll probably actually revisit and work again)

“If my humors happen to please some worthy man… he will try to meet me. I give him a big advantage… for all (the) long acquaintance and familarity could have gained for him in several years, he can see in 3 days in this record, and more exactly.” – Michel de Montaigne

I can rant for hours about everything that I think is wrong with school. Right now, I think the most glaring omission from my education was the fact that it was never properly conveyed to me that you can aspire to be a man of letters, and that that has been a successful path for exceptional people for hundreds of years. I don’t mean to sound bitter, this is sort of a casual truth – most people aren’t exceptional. And I’m not sure I would recommend being exceptional, since that’s simultaneously being a deviant, and deviance is tough.

I guess part of the point is that you have to figure it out yourself.

I remember watching Lin Manuel Miranda talk about Hamilton white house poetry jam – he says, “I’m actually working on a hip-hop album. It’s a concept album about the life of someone I think embodies hip-hop Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton. (laughter) You laugh, but it’s true! He was born a penniless orphan in St. Croix of illegitimate birth, became George Washington’s right-hand man, became Treasury Secretary, caught beef with every other founding father. And all in the strength of his writing, I think he embodies the word’s ability to make a difference.”

I was looking into this a while back when thinking about public intellectuals and scanning through history

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was described as “arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history” – his parents were booksellers and he was literally born at home above his father’s bookshop

montaigne

erasmus

mersenne

voltaire, samuel johnson, JS mill, poe

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I’m just going to talk about these people.

Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (1466-1536)

I’m shocked at how recently I learned about Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, who according to Wikipedia is considered one of the greatest scholars of the northern Renaissance. He corresponded with literally hundreds of people in the 1500s.

He was born out of wedlock in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Both of his parents died in a plague. He became a catholic priest like his father, studied at monastic schools, was possibly gay, was offered the post of secretary to a Bishop on account of his skill in Latin and his reputation as a man of letters… studied at the university of Paris, taught at Oxford…

He urged internal reform of the Catholic Church, was good friends with Thomas More (who wrote Utopia), was lauded as “Prince of the Humanists”, famously argued with Martin Luther on the subject of free will, travelled widely across Europe, and died of dysentery at 69.

The man wrote thousands of letters, getting replies from Pope Adrian VI, Pope Leo X, Henry VIII… a bastard child who was orphaned at 17!

“Despite a chronic shortage of money, he succeeded in learning Greek by an intensive day-and-night study of three years, continuously begging in letters that his friends send him books and money for teachers.”

Erasmus and Da Vinci were alive at the same time (Leo X was, after all, a Medici, the second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent), but it doesn’t look like they corresponded.

(Stefan Zweig wrote quite a moving biography of him: Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1934.)

Erasmus worked at the print shop of Aldus Manutius (c1450–1515) – teacher, scholar, founder of the Aldine press, Inventor of Italics, publisher of new copies of Plato, Aristotle, a friend to all books and libraries until the end of time.

Marin Mersenne (1588-1648)

(thread)

~50 years after Erasmus came Marin Mersenne, an ordained Catholic priest who was called “the post-box of Europe”. He was mutuals with Descartes, Pascal, Hobbes, Galileo, Huygenes. If you wanted to get something to someone, you sent it to him, and he’d reroute it.

Mersenne was one of Galileo’s most ardent supporters and he insisted that Galileo publish his work outside Italy Mersenne himself did some math – Mersenne prime numbers (Mn = 2^n − 1) are named after him – but his correspondence & distribution was his real contribution.

Mersenne also formed his own informal private academy where he spread Descartes’ ideas… a recurring phrase used to describe him is “a clearing house for correspondence between philosophers and scientists”.

Some bits about Mersenne’s life: He was born in 1588, same as Hobbes. He was the child of a laborer, but managed to study with the Jesuits and joined the Minim Friars. He introduced his correspondents to each other, which established a comms network, and he also also challenged and encouraged them.

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)

Gertrude Stein was born to a wealthy family, raised in Oakland CA. Both her parents died by the time she was 17. At Radcliffe College, she was a student of William James, who called her brilliant and encouraged her to go to med school. She got bored and flunked out.

“She had spent many of her evenings not applying herself to her studies, but taking long walks and attending the opera.” Her uncorseted physical appearance and eccentric mode of dress aroused comment and she was described as “Big and floppy and sandaled and not caring a damn”.

In 1902 her brother Leo (left) left for London hoping to pursue an art career, and Gertrude followed – and a year later they relocated to Paris. Here Gertrude would host a weekly Saturday night salon that attained legendary status, which is the reason I’m making this thread

Who attended her salons? Some of her guests that you might recognize are: Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclar Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Matisse. Here’s Gertrude in her Paris studio, with portrait of her that was painted by Picasso.

According to art critic Henry McBride, the Steins’ art collection was “just about the most potent of any that I have ever heard of in history.” He observed that Gertude “collected geniuses rather than masterpieces. She recognized them a long way off.”

her words: “for me, all modern painting is based on what Cézanne nearly made… he insisted on showing his incapacity: he spread his lack of success: showing what he could not do, became an obsession for him.”

“a mecca for the modern-minded” — eventually Gertrude couldn’t afford Picasso’s paintings “She was often charged with being a cult-writer, supported by an influential and fashionable coterie of friends”

Meng’s footnote: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780810883123/Avant-Garde-An-American-Odyssey-from-Gertrude-Stein-to-Pierre-Boulez

// abandoned

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I wrote my way out / men of letters

(24apr2023 → 30oct2024: this strikes me as a victory lap post, the kind of thing I publish later… or post to /archives/ i guess)

I’ve spent a lot of time and energy questioning my education

you can nerdsnipe your way into the circles of billionaires and heads of state

Erasmus, Mersenne

I have this power. I want to democratize this power to people who will use it for good

For centuries now it’s been possible to be a “man of letters”. I’m not sure what it was like before literacy, before the printing press, before postal services… it must have been harder in some ways, or not relevant. If you have any notes on that I’d be curious to check them out separately but that’s not what I want to talk about. Marcus Aurelius could afford the luxury of writing because he was emperor. 1500 years later we have Montaigne, but he was rich. I suppose I could look into my people doc to study people. Samuel Johnson. Goethe.

I want to get the Aldine press symbol as a tattoo to remind myself that I am a man of letters. Or maybe I need to look for something marginally more obscure in relation to movable type. I also want an internet tattoo. I was telling Brent about Jim carrey and Steve Wozniak

Education by fathers. Wozniak. Feynman. Who was Pericles tutored by? Lincoln? 

what exactly is the virtue of a man of letters? why does it matter? what difference does it make? what is the job of a man of letters? the first thing that comes to mind is that his job is to think, to argue, to explain, to make sense of things. why is that important? well- thoughts are upstream of almost everything else? funny. they make things clear. i haven’t made this clear to myself. what is the utility of clarity? without clarity we’re grasping around fumbling in the dark. men of science figure out how the material universe works, which allows us to manipulate it. we get to cook our food, perform heart surgery, survive in inhospitable environments, capture and transmit images instantaneously for seemingly no cost across the planet.

what do we do with all that power? what are some goals we could have? what’s next? that’s the man of letters’ job

Strategic utterances (2024sept21)

I’ve always believed that a few well-chosen words, sentences, paragraphs, can make a tremendous difference in the world. That’s why writing is my vocation. Well-arranged words rearrange reality. 

They don’t really teach you this in school. In fact I’d argue that school is a system designed to resist change. Dampen change. When I was a kid I was really mad about this. Now I’ve come to see it in a more neutral light. it kinda just is what it is