Better Company Than Caesar
What is this urge that makes us want to be seen as something we aren’t. Take this blog, for example. I am in no way a writer. Barely even a proper blogger. My professional life has very little of this kind of writing. Scientific and investor communication, sure; but not this. Why do I have — and always have had — this urge to be, and be seen, as creative? Is this some kind of performative, effortless polymathism?
Orangutan (Orangoetan) (1914) print in high resolution by Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita.
Perhaps the desire is to be a modern Renaissance man. In of Montaigne’s essays is the following passage:
“They would rather talk at length about other people’s trade, instead of their own, and so hope to be seen as accomplished in yet another field. Like when Archidamus faulted Periander for abandoning his reputation as a good doctor to acquire one as a bad poet.
See how Caesar goes out of his way to make us understand his ingenuity in building bridges and siege weapons. And, conversely, how much he refrains from talking about the responsibilities of his profession, his courage, and how he led his troops. His deeds prove he was an excellent officer. He wants to be known as an excellent engineer, an entirely different occupation!
Dionysus the Elder was a great military leader, as fortune would have him. But he did everything he could to be known mainly through poetry, although he knew little of it.”
Montaigne, if not a “Renaissance man”, is a man of the Renaissance. Yet he quotes even older examples of this urge. We have leaders who are CEOs or investors and want to be known or seen as being accomplished engineers or physicists. Fields they are rather bad at. Perhaps there is a common kind of mania here. Maybe it takes hold in the minds of the mover and shakers of history. But what of us not of a geologic character?
I don’t think this applies to us regular folks. Hobbies and deep interests do provide something critical however. Happiness. I don’t really care much about being seen as an expert in writing, making pretty plots, or even performing some AI-for-biology contortion. I would like to know how to do it and how to do it well. I am led by the pleasures of intense curiosity. That is better company than Caesar, I assure you.
Maria Popova writes in one of her wonderful essays on Bertrand Russell:
‘In my darkest hours, what has saved me again and again is some action of unselfing — some instinctive wakefulness to an aspect of the world other than myself: a helping hand extended to someone else’s struggle, the dazzling galaxy just discovered millions of lightyears away, the cardinal trembling in the tree outside my window. We know this by its mirror-image — to contact happiness of any kind is “to be dissolved into something complete and great,” something beyond the bruising boundaries of the ego.’
By the end of 2023, I was in proper burnout.*1 It wasn’t until I was able to focus my mind on reading new things that recovery felt possible. Earlier this year I joined the Contraptions book club and that complete focusing of attention has buoyed my mental state even higher. Enough to write regularly and to be ever more creative at my day job.
So, I guess, the Nobel-winning philosopher and mathematician did know a thing or two when he decided to write a book with the title in The Conquest of Happiness.
“The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”
Sidenote: I suspect Montaigne, who was about my age when he started to write also went through a midlife crisis. This sidenote is somewhere between projection and basking in reflected glory. ↩︎#bertrandRussell #burnout #Creativity #curiosity #Happiness #history #hobbies #impostorSyndrome #mariaPopova #montaigne #personalGrowth #philosophy #polymath #renaissance #theConquestOfHappiness #writingLife
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