Perpetual busynesss: In a special Harper Review double feature, both letters and essays abound. Harris Lencz tackles the recent trend of “rawdogging flights”—the internet’s playfully indelicate term for going the length of a journey without pursuing distraction of any kind. A person is rarely alone with his own thoughts nowadays, so the practice strikes many as bizarre. But Lencz suggests that 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal’s Pensées might lend the trend some philosophical depth. Pascal’s existentialism regards man’s “feeble mortal” condition as the thing that makes him seek distraction. Lack of diversion might force us to face difficult questions like, “Why am I here? Who am I? How ought I live before I die?” In a world increasingly consumed with the frivolous distractions of the internet and the supposedly more noble pursuits of work and school, it can be tempting to avoid confrontation with oneself. But Lencz argues that the next time you take a flight, consider your perspective on life “so you know who you are and what matters to you.”
Meanwhile, assistant editor Brady Santoro contributes the final answer to The Harper Review’s autumn 2024 query, “Should you love your country?” Santoro argues that it is ridiculous to place value on the act of loving itself. Ordering someone to love makes it an unfree act. Ordering love for an abstract concept, like a country, is even more futile because “there is no sense … of what is being loved.” A complete idea of a country is difficult to define, not to mention that a country is but a “connecting agent between subjects and what are, ultimately, aims of desire and utility.” Santoro posits that, instead, a person can choose to love his country—a much more conscious and practical expenditure of affection. Soliciting love of country is “neither … possible nor prudent.”
Meanwhile, assistant editor Brady Santoro contributes the final answer to The Harper Review’s autumn 2024 query, “Should you love your country?” Santoro argues that it is ridiculous to place value on the act of loving itself. Ordering someone to love makes it an unfree act. Ordering love for an abstract concept, like a country, is even more futile because “there is no sense … of what is being loved.” A complete idea of a country is difficult to define, not to mention that a country is but a “connecting agent between subjects and what are, ultimately, aims of desire and utility.” Santoro posits that, instead, a person can choose to love his country—a much more conscious and practical expenditure of affection. Soliciting love of country is “neither … possible nor prudent.”
Elizabeth Eck, senior editor
Kid Dynamite in retrospect: I haven’t been able to stop thinking about boxer Mike Tyson since his fight against YouTube personality Jake Paul. I watched the lead-up to the fight like I was rubbernecking at a crash. The whole thing seemed sort of sad to me. I wondered what was going through Tyson’s mind when he took the deal, when he did his pre-fight interviews, when he slapped Jake Paul at the weigh-in ceremony. I wasn’t alive in the ’90s, when Tyson was “the most dangerous man in the world.” Without that mythos, it seemed ludicrous that a fight between a twenty-seven year old and an almost senior citizen could be anything but one-sided. I pitied Tyson—at least I did, until I remembered that he raped a woman named Desiree Washington; that he bit off the corner of Evander Holyfield’s ear; that he was once worth $400 million and spent his way into tens of millions of dollars of debt. I never saw Mike Tyson, the most dangerous man in the world. Instead, I saw Mike Tyson the old man; Mike Tyson the podcast host; Mike Tyson the pigeon breeder.
Now there’s Mike Tyson the circus attraction. A shot of Tyson’s bare buttocks went viral before the fight, and now a pornography website is offering him a six-figure deal. Your guess is as good as mine whether he’ll accept. The point is, for a man who has spent so long in the spotlight, Tyson is hard to describe in full.
In 1997, shortly before that fight with Holyfield, The New Yorker released their profile of Tyson. This is Mike Tyson just past the zenith of his fame, when the holes started appearing in his armor. But it’s still Tyson of the nineties, before the tribal tattoo and the bankruptcy and the movie cameos. If you, like me, have a hard time consolidating all the versions of Mike Tyson, I encourage you to read it. It captures one very specific iteration of the boxer: the one that was simultaneously an object of hate and admiration and disgust. Reading it after the Jake Paul fight is a trip.
Now there’s Mike Tyson the circus attraction. A shot of Tyson’s bare buttocks went viral before the fight, and now a pornography website is offering him a six-figure deal. Your guess is as good as mine whether he’ll accept. The point is, for a man who has spent so long in the spotlight, Tyson is hard to describe in full.
In 1997, shortly before that fight with Holyfield, The New Yorker released their profile of Tyson. This is Mike Tyson just past the zenith of his fame, when the holes started appearing in his armor. But it’s still Tyson of the nineties, before the tribal tattoo and the bankruptcy and the movie cameos. If you, like me, have a hard time consolidating all the versions of Mike Tyson, I encourage you to read it. It captures one very specific iteration of the boxer: the one that was simultaneously an object of hate and admiration and disgust. Reading it after the Jake Paul fight is a trip.
William Moursund, contributing editor
Into the abyss: Algis Valiunas, writing in First Things magazine, takes readers through a tour of two German poets: Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke. Valiunas uses another German—philosopher Martin Heidegger—as his guide, due to a mutual nostalgia for an “enchanted” world. In the absence of the immanence of the divine (an absence of prophecy, one might say) and in response to historical erasure of such intervention, Heidegger entrusted the poets, not the philosophers, to “reach into the abyss.” For Heidegger, only from here could re-enchantment begin.
The “abyss” stands in contrast to the hectic and quotidian life of modernity. Hölderlin recognized this when he ultimately rejected philosophy in favor of mantic poetry. He saw the futility of his efforts to restore enchantment but continued to write poems anyway, even when suffering from psychiatric illness. Heidegger and Valiunas then move on to Rilke. Like Hölderlin, Rilke wrote his poetry in unpredictable bursts and ascribed his creativity to something akin to divine inspiration. Rilke, however, ultimately celebrates only the “earthly”: this world rather than the next.
Valiunas is right to conclude that these poets were decidedly not prophets, but nonetheless should still be read for their beauty—and their need for God. Valiunas posits that Hölderlin’s mental illness resulted from “[h]is whipsawing between transport and desolation.” We should not, then, find refuge in the abyss and abandon contemporary life (no offense to Heidegger). Maybe Rilke was half—but only half!—right to realize the importance of this world. Interestingly, Valiunas begins by briefly noting Heidegger’s infamous Nazism, but with such a conclusion in mind, perhaps this first and seemingly unrelated sentence was a warning. The German profoundly understood the problem of modernity, but was therefore so easily convinced of terrible solutions. Unfortunately, as the late philosopher Allan Bloom detaileddecades ago, we are all Germans now.
The “abyss” stands in contrast to the hectic and quotidian life of modernity. Hölderlin recognized this when he ultimately rejected philosophy in favor of mantic poetry. He saw the futility of his efforts to restore enchantment but continued to write poems anyway, even when suffering from psychiatric illness. Heidegger and Valiunas then move on to Rilke. Like Hölderlin, Rilke wrote his poetry in unpredictable bursts and ascribed his creativity to something akin to divine inspiration. Rilke, however, ultimately celebrates only the “earthly”: this world rather than the next.
Valiunas is right to conclude that these poets were decidedly not prophets, but nonetheless should still be read for their beauty—and their need for God. Valiunas posits that Hölderlin’s mental illness resulted from “[h]is whipsawing between transport and desolation.” We should not, then, find refuge in the abyss and abandon contemporary life (no offense to Heidegger). Maybe Rilke was half—but only half!—right to realize the importance of this world. Interestingly, Valiunas begins by briefly noting Heidegger’s infamous Nazism, but with such a conclusion in mind, perhaps this first and seemingly unrelated sentence was a warning. The German profoundly understood the problem of modernity, but was therefore so easily convinced of terrible solutions. Unfortunately, as the late philosopher Allan Bloom detaileddecades ago, we are all Germans now.
Jacob Neplokh, contributing editor