Odds and ends

Banger.

The ‘Instagram Generation’ now experiences the present as an anticipated memory. - Daniel Kahneman

This wonderful article touches on several themes close to my heart — living an intellectual life, what it means to pursue knowledge, the value of solitude and silence, the culture of optimization, and more. I kept nodding along as I read it.

In his quietly disciplined way, Sertillanges insisted that the intellectual life is not merely the accumulation of knowledge, but a vocation that demands rigor, sacrifice, and a deep moral anchoring. The thinker, he wrote, is someone “who lives by thought, and who works at it systematically.” Not tweets. Not hot takes. Not even Substacks.

In 1920, the stakes were clear. The intellectual was a custodian of truth and of civilization. There was urgency in Sertillanges’ vision, a recognition that ideas have consequences, and that the wrong ones, eugenics, fascism, utopian technocracy, could kill. The thinker’s solitude was not an escape, but a crucible. Today, speed is the metric of genius. He would be horrified by YouTube Shorts, or heaven forbid, a 15-second TikTok. After all, as he warned: “A thought too fast is a thought ill-made.”

What a brilliant article on how close some of our greatest literary works came to being completely destroyed:

Surviving unread and uncopied for 500 years in some English monastic library, the manuscript passed through the turbulence of the dissolution of the monasteries and the scattering of their books, not to end up on a bonfire or to be used as a convenient wrapping for butter or fish, but to come into the hands of Tudor antiquarians and book lovers, only then to pass through the ordeal by fire of 1731, surviving but only just. It was not until 1787 that a copy was made, not until 1815 that it appeared in print, not until 1833 that there was a reputable edition. So, Beowulf survived. But what other works have been lost so completely that we do not even know they have been lost?

Related to this article because I’m working on a small project—in my individual capacity, I might add—to create a directory of sorts for all the Indian literary works in the public domain. A civilization like India has a rich history going back millennia, and once I started learning about the kind of rare treasures that are in the public domain, the lack of appreciation for our cultural history just made me nauseous.

So ideally, I would have loved to create a website like Project Gutenberg where all the Indian literary works across languages that are in the public domain are neatly scanned and made available freely and openly to be easily readable. But I don’t have the resources now, or the technical know-how to do it. So what I’m doing is just starting with a simple site where I aggregate links to manuscripts that have been scanned and uploaded on places like archive.org, university libraries, and so on and so forth.

And it’s for that reason, you know, that I relate to this article—because it’s kind of stunning that not only do we understand our history based on surviving books, but many of those works survived because of, I don’t know how else to say it, just sheer dumb luck. The fact that Lucretius’ poems survived because the people he railed against copied it. The fact that the lone surviving manuscript of Beowulf was damaged but not completely burnt in the Ashburnham House fire in 1731. It’s just ridiculous.

And these aren’t just random texts—Beowulf is one of the earliest works in English, an important part of understanding the lineage of English literature and culture. Lucretius’ work is important because it’s one of the most complete surviving expressions of ancient materialist philosophy—the idea that we’re all made of atoms, there’s no afterlife, no higher superpower creating the world, and so on. These are important works that give us a sense of the lineage and history of many of the modern debates that still rage on in science and religion.

If politicians who are responsible for preserving cultural artifacts are reading this, this should serve as a wake-up call for them to do more and to preserve the collective wisdom of our civilization. But millennial apathy is rampant. You can feel the stench of apathy everywhere. And it’s sad, but very few people care about our cultural treasures.