A member of our high school chat group who says his net worth has decreased because of the Biden administration’s policies (as for my net worth, you’d have to ask my doubles partners) has recommended that his classmates take in a couple of Fox shows for balance, even-handed pandering and fair-minded lying apparently being indicated when it comes to curing liberal biases.
I could say I’ve been aggrieved too, but by the former administration, having been subject for some years now to restrictive state and local tax deduction limits, Trump’s way of thumbing his nose at the blue, high-tax states of New York and California. But, so be it. I’m in too good a mood this balmy spring day to kvetch about my ox being gored. How, on this day, can you not wish the best for everyone? “It’s a good day to have a good day,” I said to the woman in the urologist’s office this morning after she said she hoped I’d have one.
I was there to talk about what rhymes with the late singer Gorme’s first name in the hopes that I’ll someday soon be able to mirror in my humble fashion the Easter story. But enough: It’s not a good day to do nothing but complain. It never is.
Sarah Bakewell’s “Humanly Possible,” an intellectual history of humanists, beginning with Protagoras, has been lightening my mood lately, for they — as a group that includes, but is by no means limited to Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Erasmus, Montaigne, Voltaire, David Hume, Frederick Douglass, E.M. Forster, John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, and Zora Neale Hurston — were in essence optimists, lovers of life who loved to connect, in accordance with Forster’s dictum.
Of Chartres cathedral, Bakewell says at one point, “I do not share the [Christian] faith myself, yet I found it impossible to walk around Chartres without feeling a (slightly nervous) faith in humanity. It is true that human beings have several times come close to knocking it down” — two of those times being soon after the French revolution and during the Second World War. “But other human beings keep trying, even harder, to make it stay up.”
Those words I find to be particularly resonant today.