Little Soul

Little souls who thirst for fight,

these men were born to drill and die.

— Stephen Crane

Like 190 thousand other Irishmen, Mike Folliard, my cousin six times removed, fled County Roscommon in the 1850s to escape starvation.

He wound up living on a farm outside leafy Franklin, New Jersey.

Mike was 18 in late July 1861, when Congress authorized formation of an army of 500 thousand volunteers—a call to arms that was immediately met by men like Mike, who enlisted for the thrill of marching into battle and the steady paycheck promised (Mike mailed all his army pay to Ireland, as boat fare for a widowed sister).

On August 27, Mike was mustered into the 1st New Jersey Cavalry (the "Jersey Cavaliers") at Trenton. At some point the next month, while stationed in Washington, DC, he visited a photography studio—likely that of Matthew Brady—to have his portrait taken in his handsome, new uniform.

That was the last time he'd do anything so civilized. 

Just a few weeks later, he found himself in Virginia, riding scout to defend the capital from Confederate takeover.

Cavalry was used throughout the Civil War as an infantry commanders' "eyes and ears," so Mike's regiment was nearly always exposed to enemy fire.

Mike's regiment fought in major battles at Cross Keys, Cedar Mountain, Brandy Station, Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Brandy Station, Gettysburg and Bristoe Station.

During the latter engagement, in October 1863, Mike was captured by surprise outside a village known as Buckland. The cavalry officer who allowed Mike's regiment to be entrapped, as it had been, was none other than General George Armstrong Custer.

Mike was summarily transported to Andersonville Prison in Georgia, where he lived among 45,000 other Federal POWs inside a stockade surrounding 16 acres of land (the size of three city blocks).

As it was to many other prisoners, Andersonville was unkind to Mike.

He died of scurvy on July 25, 1864, six months after his capture.

A thousand other POWs at Andersonville died, as Mike did, of a disease brought on by starvation.

He was only 21.

Above: Little Soul by Robert Francis James.  Oil on canvas. 11 x 14 inches. From an 1861 photograph of Corporal Mike Folliard, who is buried in grave Number 3938 at Andersonville National Cemetery.

Vemödalen

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

— Ecclesiastes

A fellow artist expressed to me yesterday her disappointment that realist painters—even of the caliber of Monet and Van Gogh—never add anything original to our culture.

Photographers have a word for that wistful feeling: vemödalen.

Vemödalen—the feeling everything has already been done—was coined by the Swiss blogger John Koening, whose Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows defines "emotions we feel, but don't have words to express."

According to Koening, vemödalen is "the frustration of photographing something amazing, when thousands of identical photos already exist."

Those thousands of precedent photos turn mine into "something hollow, pulpy and cheap, like a mass-produced piece of furniture you happen to have assembled yourself."

By this definition, vemödalen (a word doubtless derived from the Swedish vemod, meaning "melancholy") is a kind of weltschmerz that mistakes every work of art as another flat-pack item from Ikea.

It's easy to understand where vemödalen comes from.

Unoriginality is baked into human existence, as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger proved in Being and Time.

Heidegger calls the self of our everyday being the "they-self" (Man-selbst).

The they-self is a conformist and unoriginal way of engaging with the world.

Heidegger claims that I am not myself as I go about the tasks that preoccupy me every day. 

I am, instead, the they-self, a worker among workers, a productive citizen, a member of the crowd.

The they-self, he says, represents "concerned absorption in the world we encounter. 

"The 'they' prescribes our way of interpreting the world."

In other words, I don't encounter the world: they do. 

"It is not 'I', in the sense of my own self, that 'am,' but others, whose way is that of the 'they,'" Heidegger says.

While being a they-self feels comfortable, Heidegger insists, remaining one is a choice: a choice to surrender your soul to the "dictatorship of the they;" to surrender, sheepishly, to conformity, mediocrity, practicality, and ingenuousness.

In a real sense, Heidegger says, we wear a disguise our whole lives: the disguise of the they. And that disguise—that inauthentic self—tricks us into believing "there's nothing new under the sun" when, in fact, everything under the sun is new every moment of every day, if only we open our eyes to it.

.
"It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die," Oscar Wilde once wrote. 

"Most people are other people. Their life is a mimicry."

Above: Orange. Oil on fiberboard. 8 x 10 inches.

Wokescolds

When the left becomes grimly censorious,
it incubates its own opposition.

— Michelle Goldberg

During an interview with a professor of English yesterday, I asked whether the late novelist John Updike belongs in the modern canon.

Wryly he answered, "It depends on whose canon."

The cause of his caution was obvious: not knowing who I was, the professor wanted to be spared another bashing by a possible wokescold.

Wokescolds—those busybodies who bash you for any show of disinterest in their causes—are the bane of the Democrats.

They're why the party will lose the midterm elections.

Wokescolds are dangerous because they're smug and obnoxious.

While they relentlessly shame us for our indifference to special-interest issues like "transgender equality," "microaggression," and "cultural appropriation," they remain blind to the fact that most of us care more about guns, gas, and the stock market.

They're dangerous because they make ready targets for right-wing hipsters, who can mobilize uninformed voters with post-apocalyptic visions of a Stalin-style government—even though 8 of 10 Millennial voters don't know who Stalin was.

So here's my two cents.

Wokescolds should take a vacation. 

A long one.

I recommend Mexico. 

With its tropical beaches, boutique hotels, and feisty cuisine, Mexico offers the ideal spot for a getaway.

Just ask Ted Cruz.

And while on vacation, I recommend that the wokescolds bring a little light reading.

Aristotle's Rhetoric would do nicely.

That's where they'll find these morsels of wisdom:

A statement is persuasive either because it is directly self-evident or appears to be proved from other statements that are so. In either case, it is persuasive because there is somebody whom it persuades. 

But no art theorizes about an individual. Rhetoric is concerned not with what seems probable to a given individual, but with what seems probable to a whole class of people. 

Rhetoric, too, draws upon the routine subjects of debate. The duty of rhetoric is to deal with key issues in the hearing of persons who cannot take in a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.

Got that, wokescolds?

And if Aristotle doesn't convince you to drop the smug and obnoxious rhetoric, maybe you should stay in Mexico—permanently.

After all, you'll love it down there. 

I hear the Mexicans are debating transgender bathrooms.

Aged to Perfection

 

Who can forget the last line of the 1973 film Soylent Green?

I worry that with the ever-rising price of groceries and Millennials' open contempt for Boomers we may be heading for the ghastly future the movie portrayed.

And why not?

From a public policy standpoint, converting old people into grub makes fiscal sense, when you consider the cost Boomers will soon impose on our nation.

As of 2022, the average retired man in this country has only $118 thousand in savings; the average retired woman, only $57 thousand.

Among retirees, 14 percent of men, and 24 percent of women, have less than $10 thousand in savings.

The average nursing home costs $108 thousand a year.

Safety nets for indigent retirees are in place, of course; but there are nearly 70 million Boomers still living—after the Millennials, the nation's second largest population group.

Who can possibly afford the cost of those safety nets?

How to Rein Regret

 

We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.

— Sean Covey

Like his six previous books, Dan Pink's latest, The Power of Regret, bundles decades of social-science research into a subject to draw a general conclusion.

In this case, the subject is remorse, the inescapable, rearview-mirror feeling that I could have done better. And Pink's conclusion is that regret, if tamed, is a powerful propellent to self-improvement. 

I highly recommend the 200-page book.

Pink shows over and over that he has a knack for finding obscure research papers and mining clear conclusions from them, while leading his reader along a complex train of thought quickly and gracefully.

The heart of the book is Part Two, where Pink reveals the four "core regrets," which he has unearthed not from others' findings, but through his own original research among 4,500 subjects—the single largest study of regret ever conducted. 

The core regrets are not what you'd guess.

First, there are foundation regrets, what Pink describes as "failures of foresight and conscientiousness." Most of these have to do with ignoring our education, health, and savings; in other words, with goofing off and living large.

Second, there are boldness regrets, past choices to "play it safe." Most of these regrets have to do with career, romance, and travel. Boldness regrets dwell on the "roads not taken." 

Third, there are moral regrets, big and small lapses in the way you treated lovers, children, friends, enemies, employers—even animals. We tend to agonize over these.

Fourth, there are connection regrets, which form the largest category of regrets. "They arise." Pink writes, "from relationships that have come undone or that remain incomplete." He tidily calls these regrets "rifts and drifts."

Pink's formula for taming regrets (Part Three of the book) comprises seven distinct elements:

• Apologize to those you harmed
• Find a silver lining in your lapse
• Admit your faux paus to others
• Develop compassion for yourself
• Accept frailty and move on
• Keep things in perspective
• Decide what you'll do differently in the future

Taking these actions, Pink says, will turn your regrets from morbid emotions into powerful goads to a better you.

My one complaint about The Power of Regret concerns an omission: Pink never once refers to "Step 9" of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Alcoholics in recovery are emperors of regrets. In order to kick the habit, Step 9 demands that they "make direct amends wherever possible, except when to do so would injure others."

By looking into AA's Step 9, Pink might have saved himself a lot of effort.

Folks have been there before.