as you can imagine I am feeling very
self-conscious I’ve been thinking about
this feeling for a few weeks now and I
want to invite you tonight to share as
much of this feeling with me as you can
I want you to think that is as deeply as
possible about why and how you exist
my aim is similar to that thought
experiment you may have heard which bids
you have been told the date of your
death a week a month a year from now and
to let that thought in part it’s sudden
wisdom and the clear unobstructed view
that it gives you of what matters as
Samuel Johnson put it when a man knows
that he is to be hanged in a fortnight
it concentrates his mind wonderfully we
all know that we will die mercifully
most of us have not been given to date
is there a way of concentrating the mind
so wonderfully without a fictional much
less a real date certain for the end of
our life I think there is in what say to
Gustin of Hippo describes as becoming a
problem to oneself that is rather than
taking life for granted and
concentrating on its meaning in view of
its imminent end we ask why life at all
this is what Augustin describes as doing
the hard labor in the field of oneself
and it’s a hard labor that we do in many
ways but I want to concentrate tonight
on one way that we perform this labor
and that is to listen together carefully
to the dead with our eyes that is to
enact one of the great miracles of human
existence and to read reading gives us
access to a vast record of wonder the
fruits of other’s labors in the fields
of their own selves to listen to the
dead with his eyes is how Francisco de
Quevedo a statesman and man of letters
in early 17th century Spain described
his own solitary reading his way of
retreating from the distractions of the
world and taking his measure of what
mattered but already in kobato’s
presence I sensed the labor of becoming
a problem to myself through reading
becoming even harder for in his presence
I overhear his contemporary and his
close friend Miguel de Cervantes who
regales us regularly from beyond his
grave with the Adventures of the
ingenious nobleman of La Mancha Don
Quixote Don Quixote loved books so much
so that he became one so enchanted was
he by the dragon slaying damsel saving
lives of the Knights errant in his
novels that he began to live his life
accordingly too much comic and poignant
effect
Don Quixote is a great novel in part
because it is such a searching
examination of the confounding power of
books and of all the technologies that
we have created for ourselves to create
ourselves what I would bid you think at
this stage is of our own worry about our
own technologies those that we have
created to create ourselves and how we
are afraid that they may be capturing us
that our smartphones are smarter than we
are that they use us more than we use
them notice for example that as I speak
I myself and being captured rendered
into billions of bits of digital
information into a seamless echo of
myself to be sent off in a billion
different directions into the digiverse
to be thus rendered is why I have
rendered myself up onto this stage to
join in a collective effort to create
the comforting illusion of an intact
enduring self why an illusion well to
begin with this is all supposed to
what’s more as I speak I myself unlike
my digital echo cannot be edited or
paused or replayed as I said I’m feeling
self-conscious in the early 17th century
the popular book was the newest of the
technologies of the self it’s not mere
whimsy to think of them as the
smartphone’s of the day Cervantes was
fascinated by how this newest technology
of the self was insinuating itself into
human consciousness shaping it getting
between us and the world that we live in
his biggest joke is not on his hapless
night but on his inattentive readers who
are so captivated by Don Quixote
windmill tilting pratfalls all of his
noble absurdity that they Menace that he
is always and already no more or less
than what he set out to be and that is
the hero of his own book words on a page
squiggles of ink on sheets of the dried
pulp of rags I haven’t proposed books as
a way toward a clearer sense of what
meaning our lives have only to reject
them rather what I want to do is suggest
how great art of any kind
simultaneously enchants us and reveals
its own artifice it distracts us from
ourselves and confronts us with
ourselves simultaneously with the
question why is it we create illusions
to come to terms with our reality
what kind of thing am i that anything
matters to me at all it’s always been
thus and always will be thus 2,000 years
before Don Quixote sprang from
Cervantes’s brow armed with some of the
sharpest irony ever forged the great
philosophical irenna Socrates was
warning us against reading of any kind
books he observed don’t teach you much
of anything at all when you ask them a
question they just keep saying the same
thing it’s hard to know who’s even
speaking in a book Socrates himself
being a case in point
Socrates never wrote a word he did all
of his philosophizing in conversation
his conversations were reported for us
by his student Plato sometimes long
after they had occurred and sometimes in
Socrates and Plato together make one of
the great ventriloquist acts of history
but Socrates did not have time for books
he said because he had dedicated himself
to following the inscription on the
Temple of the Oracle at Delphi that bids
us to know thyself
of course Plato is having a little joke
because Socrates to know himself merely
would have had to take up the book that
Plato had made him into and read but
Socrates does not have time for books in
part because he knows that he will die
he only has a certain amount of time
with himself we know as Plato’s readers
that he will die famously at the hands
of the Athenian people
executed for corrupting the city’s youth
among them play ho just to point out Don
Quixote will be that man whose mind and
heart are so wonderfully concentrated in
view of his own death but on the day of
his death Socrates tells those who have
come to comfort him to themselves be
comforted with wondrous equanimity he
says to them that he has been practicing
philosophizing he tells them is nothing
more than practicing to die what he
means by this is that he has been
separating the things of his mind
which lasts his ideas from his body
which does not and will perish what may
matter more to us is his manner of
philosophizing in a word it is to wonder
in a phrase to become a problem to
himself and to make problems of
themselves to others he asked questions
persistent searching questions how do I
know what is virtue how should I act so
persistent and searching where his
questions that some have said that that
may be one reason he was executed but am
I asking us all to become like Socrates
Paragons of determined reason and of
stoic detachment not exactly Socrates
does exemplify the peaceful dignity and
the ethical acuity of the examined life
but in his wandering about that life he
falls short because we our bodies
we do feel and are sometimes overcome by
feeling we want ways of wondering about
ourselves that deal with all the
dimensions of our existence and so I
turn to conclude to one last figure in
the record of wonder in books and that
is job job you’ll recall was the man of
many sorrows blameless in the eyes of
God and yet who suffers most greatly
losing everything he has almost a
tableau his farm his family his friends
his health all gone as the story goes
because his God decided to test his
faith would job curse God and die know
when job’s comforters come to him he
does not curse God and die he curses the
day of his birth Jobe wishes that he had
that is terrible suffering to live a
life that you don’t think is worth
living I do wonder how that feels and in
wondering how that feels I have to ask
myself what it is I’ve been given in my
consciousness to myself what am I to
myself that I exist and in asking these
questions I think that we are not being
selfish because to ask them we have to
have sympathized with Jobe to the very
point that he wishes that he had not
existed consider not having existed it’s
very difficult to think but it’s
possible we are surrounded in a way by
those who
and job wishes he were among them but we
can comfort ourselves by knowing that in
job we are dealing ultimately with a
book as the book of Job Falls away we
can wonder at our own capacity for
sympathy and finally we can wonder at
our ability to wonder at all for to
wonder is the only answer the job gets
to his suffering
after much wordy wrangling with his
righteous friends who have come to
explain his suffering to job job says at
last why me why have I suffered and the
answer that he gets in the form of a
whirlwind with God’s voice is not a
justification it’s not an explanation of
jobs suffering it is a litany of
questions questions of the kind that no
one will be able ever to answer the
first of which is where wast thou when I
laid the foundations of the earth I
think that all any of us can answer is
that we are here now and that is
you [Applause]
self-conscious I’ve been thinking about
this feeling for a few weeks now and I
want to invite you tonight to share as
much of this feeling with me as you can
I want you to think that is as deeply as
possible about why and how you exist
my aim is similar to that thought
experiment you may have heard which bids
you have been told the date of your
death a week a month a year from now and
to let that thought in part it’s sudden
wisdom and the clear unobstructed view
that it gives you of what matters as
Samuel Johnson put it when a man knows
that he is to be hanged in a fortnight
it concentrates his mind wonderfully we
all know that we will die mercifully
most of us have not been given to date
is there a way of concentrating the mind
so wonderfully without a fictional much
less a real date certain for the end of
our life I think there is in what say to
Gustin of Hippo describes as becoming a
problem to oneself that is rather than
taking life for granted and
concentrating on its meaning in view of
its imminent end we ask why life at all
this is what Augustin describes as doing
the hard labor in the field of oneself
and it’s a hard labor that we do in many
ways but I want to concentrate tonight
on one way that we perform this labor
and that is to listen together carefully
to the dead with our eyes that is to
enact one of the great miracles of human
existence and to read reading gives us
access to a vast record of wonder the
fruits of other’s labors in the fields
of their own selves to listen to the
dead with his eyes is how Francisco de
Quevedo a statesman and man of letters
in early 17th century Spain described
his own solitary reading his way of
retreating from the distractions of the
world and taking his measure of what
mattered but already in kobato’s
presence I sensed the labor of becoming
a problem to myself through reading
becoming even harder for in his presence
I overhear his contemporary and his
close friend Miguel de Cervantes who
regales us regularly from beyond his
grave with the Adventures of the
ingenious nobleman of La Mancha Don
Quixote Don Quixote loved books so much
so that he became one so enchanted was
he by the dragon slaying damsel saving
lives of the Knights errant in his
novels that he began to live his life
accordingly too much comic and poignant
effect
Don Quixote is a great novel in part
because it is such a searching
examination of the confounding power of
books and of all the technologies that
we have created for ourselves to create
ourselves what I would bid you think at
this stage is of our own worry about our
own technologies those that we have
created to create ourselves and how we
are afraid that they may be capturing us
that our smartphones are smarter than we
are that they use us more than we use
them notice for example that as I speak
I myself and being captured rendered
into billions of bits of digital
information into a seamless echo of
myself to be sent off in a billion
different directions into the digiverse
to be thus rendered is why I have
rendered myself up onto this stage to
join in a collective effort to create
the comforting illusion of an intact
enduring self why an illusion well to
begin with this is all supposed to
what’s more as I speak I myself unlike
my digital echo cannot be edited or
paused or replayed as I said I’m feeling
self-conscious in the early 17th century
the popular book was the newest of the
technologies of the self it’s not mere
whimsy to think of them as the
smartphone’s of the day Cervantes was
fascinated by how this newest technology
of the self was insinuating itself into
human consciousness shaping it getting
between us and the world that we live in
his biggest joke is not on his hapless
night but on his inattentive readers who
are so captivated by Don Quixote
windmill tilting pratfalls all of his
noble absurdity that they Menace that he
is always and already no more or less
than what he set out to be and that is
the hero of his own book words on a page
squiggles of ink on sheets of the dried
pulp of rags I haven’t proposed books as
a way toward a clearer sense of what
meaning our lives have only to reject
them rather what I want to do is suggest
how great art of any kind
simultaneously enchants us and reveals
its own artifice it distracts us from
ourselves and confronts us with
ourselves simultaneously with the
question why is it we create illusions
to come to terms with our reality
what kind of thing am i that anything
matters to me at all it’s always been
thus and always will be thus 2,000 years
before Don Quixote sprang from
Cervantes’s brow armed with some of the
sharpest irony ever forged the great
philosophical irenna Socrates was
warning us against reading of any kind
books he observed don’t teach you much
of anything at all when you ask them a
question they just keep saying the same
thing it’s hard to know who’s even
speaking in a book Socrates himself
being a case in point
Socrates never wrote a word he did all
of his philosophizing in conversation
his conversations were reported for us
by his student Plato sometimes long
after they had occurred and sometimes in
Socrates and Plato together make one of
the great ventriloquist acts of history
but Socrates did not have time for books
he said because he had dedicated himself
to following the inscription on the
Temple of the Oracle at Delphi that bids
us to know thyself
of course Plato is having a little joke
because Socrates to know himself merely
would have had to take up the book that
Plato had made him into and read but
Socrates does not have time for books in
part because he knows that he will die
he only has a certain amount of time
with himself we know as Plato’s readers
that he will die famously at the hands
of the Athenian people
executed for corrupting the city’s youth
among them play ho just to point out Don
Quixote will be that man whose mind and
heart are so wonderfully concentrated in
view of his own death but on the day of
his death Socrates tells those who have
come to comfort him to themselves be
comforted with wondrous equanimity he
says to them that he has been practicing
philosophizing he tells them is nothing
more than practicing to die what he
means by this is that he has been
separating the things of his mind
which lasts his ideas from his body
which does not and will perish what may
matter more to us is his manner of
philosophizing in a word it is to wonder
in a phrase to become a problem to
himself and to make problems of
themselves to others he asked questions
persistent searching questions how do I
know what is virtue how should I act so
persistent and searching where his
questions that some have said that that
may be one reason he was executed but am
I asking us all to become like Socrates
Paragons of determined reason and of
stoic detachment not exactly Socrates
does exemplify the peaceful dignity and
the ethical acuity of the examined life
but in his wandering about that life he
falls short because we our bodies
we do feel and are sometimes overcome by
feeling we want ways of wondering about
ourselves that deal with all the
dimensions of our existence and so I
turn to conclude to one last figure in
the record of wonder in books and that
is job job you’ll recall was the man of
many sorrows blameless in the eyes of
God and yet who suffers most greatly
losing everything he has almost a
tableau his farm his family his friends
his health all gone as the story goes
because his God decided to test his
faith would job curse God and die know
when job’s comforters come to him he
does not curse God and die he curses the
day of his birth Jobe wishes that he had
that is terrible suffering to live a
life that you don’t think is worth
living I do wonder how that feels and in
wondering how that feels I have to ask
myself what it is I’ve been given in my
consciousness to myself what am I to
myself that I exist and in asking these
questions I think that we are not being
selfish because to ask them we have to
have sympathized with Jobe to the very
point that he wishes that he had not
existed consider not having existed it’s
very difficult to think but it’s
possible we are surrounded in a way by
those who
and job wishes he were among them but we
can comfort ourselves by knowing that in
job we are dealing ultimately with a
book as the book of Job Falls away we
can wonder at our own capacity for
sympathy and finally we can wonder at
our ability to wonder at all for to
wonder is the only answer the job gets
to his suffering
after much wordy wrangling with his
righteous friends who have come to
explain his suffering to job job says at
last why me why have I suffered and the
answer that he gets in the form of a
whirlwind with God’s voice is not a
justification it’s not an explanation of
jobs suffering it is a litany of
questions questions of the kind that no
one will be able ever to answer the
first of which is where wast thou when I
laid the foundations of the earth I
think that all any of us can answer is
that we are here now and that is
you [Applause]
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