a portrait of the artist as a young man

The Great Cosmic Timekeeper

Say you’ve been the victim of a terrible heartbreak — you’ve been dumped by a woman who is tremendously funny and warm, and she’s also quite striking in an unconventional way. You imagined her wandering around your future cavernous apartment with an Indian headdress, serving mixed drinks for the assembled crowd while making brilliant wisecracks. You are totally devastated.

Here’s the thing: once again, the Cosmic Timekeeper has come to the rescue.

In fact, you’re 45 years old, married to the heartbreaker with two precocious and very sweet little kids. The marriage, however, is dissolving. Her tremendous qualities have, as you knew all along, a dark undercurrent: she can be cutting, and she’s drawn to the hard stuff. She has a tough exterior, but she compartmentalizes and blocks you out. She’s easy to love, but tough to live with and tough to fully trust. And having scraped and fought for her so assiduously, there’s been a built-in asymmetry in the relationship almost from the start, reinforcing whatever insecurities you might have about her caginess and fundamental inaccessibility.

You’re a wreck, basically, and you’re very worried about these amazing kids — you worry that a divorce will damage them in a deep and profound way. This is not a pleasant scenario.

So you turn, as always, to the Cosmic Timekeeper, who says, “Yeah, I can take you back to the point before this relationship will cause you grievous harm. But you’re not going to like it.”

“Honestly, I can deal with some minor unpleasantness.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re going to cling for dear life. You won’t have the guts to cut loose, so she’ll have to do it, which will sting and you’ll fight it.”

“Dude. Give me some credit.”

“Here goes, fool.”

There you are.

[Reihan. Read the full post, replete with a sketch of a woman who looks like Michael Jackson, at The American Scene.]

Update: After musing on this for a few hours, I’m pretty sure I’m going to use this technique for past relationships gone awry.

The Education Bubble

The next bubble to burst will be the education bubble. Make no mistake about it, education is big business and, like other big businesses, it is in big trouble. What people outside the education bubble don’t realize and people inside won’t admit is that many colleges and universities are in the same position that major banks and financial institutions are: their assets (endowments down 30-40 percent this year) are plummeting, their liabilities (debts) are growing, most of their costs are fixed and rising, and their income (return on investments, support from government and private donations, etc.) is falling. This is hardly a prescription for financial success.

[Mark Taylor in the New York Times]

"The sense of..."

We speak of ‘senses of’ things so unremittingly that a critical listener should conclude either we no longer have access to the things themselves or we no longer believe we can speak intelligibly about them. ‘Sense of’ speak belies a profound alienation from, or loss of faith in, the reality principle. I’m currently at work on a dissertation that tries to defend the individual, noun, against individuality, adjective, for this reason. Rather than aspiring to be individuals, we aspire to live — if I may — individualistically. That’s yet a step further removed into abstraction from ‘living individualistically’! I decline to imagine, as de Sade imagined, whether there’s one step further. But at least since Mill, we English-speakers have bought into the idea that ‘Individual’ is a title we bestow on people who are fully experiencing individuality. What on earth does that mean? It means that qualities dictate character, and not the other way around. It’s not who we are that determines the what we do, but the way we do things that determines who we are.

[James Poulos]