EthicalDative

Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Santibáñez Villegas, Juan van der Hamen, 17th century (Instituto Valencia de Don Juan)

[Domestic strife can cause one to seek comfort in odd places. During a time of gloom and stress I found relief by delving into some writings about the Stoics. I was retail advertising manager for the local newspaper, a highly deadline-driven job of long hours and many responsibilities. The home front offered little respite. In my prior abortive career as a scholar I had been interested in the polymath Spaniard Francisco de Quevedo, a prominent representative of the Stoic school of thought in his day. I wrote my
mother about my reading.]
Another area that I grope toward in my thoughts, in this fortyish second-thought time of life, is Stoicism. I wanted to develop this as a research area when at ***, and actually found some time to read two or three books about it when I was working at the Advocate. Needless to say, I didn’t find the time to do it when I was a professional academic. That reading is largely lost on me now, but the little I recall is that its roots go back to Greece; Seneca is a leading exponent in Roman times; Francisco de Quevedo is an important 17th-century Spanish Stoic; and I think I still have in a box a Xeroxed copy of a work in Latin by an English representative of Stoicism from the 17th or 18th century. What Stoicism is, or was, as a philosophy I can’t even say. There is the popular association of resignation in the face of adversity, but I know it involved much more. I know it sanctioned suicide in certain conditions; I believe Seneca did kill himself.

[Correspondence, 1987. Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]

Whence cometh much folderol. JMN, photo.

[Frank Bruni and I share an alma mater — UNC-Chapel Hill. I enjoy his columns. His account of learning touch typing at age 17 mirrors my own experience. One semester of typing class in the tenth grade has served me well. I can type fast like Bruni can. I can stare into space and record conversation in real time. Or capture my thoughts almost faster than I can think them — not always a good thing! My little Corona electric portable followed me everywhere. The transition from typewriters to computers was effortless. The QWERTY keyboard is like an organic extension of my fingertips. I seem to be a minority of my gender in the skill, however. Most of the men I’ve known are hunt-and-peckers. I confess to one failure to adapt lately: I can’t get used to using my thumbs to type on my smart phone! What follows is Bruni:]
And my typing was so very good because my typing was so very correct. I often hear, in these pedagogically permissive times, that there are many routes to solving a problem or mastering a task, and that’s true. But sometimes there really is a right way, and it’s learned through complete submission and unquestioning practice.

The emphasis today is often different, Twenge said: “Do it your own way, everybody’s unique, there are no rules.” It can feed a runaway individualism. My mother, long gone, was all for adventure and personal expression, but she was also for drudgery and humility, and I bet that she trusted secretarial school to acquaint me with both. I’d have plenty of time later to jet off to faraway lands. First, I should sit still and train my fingers to fly.
(Frank Bruni, “What I Learned in Secretarial School,” NYTimes)

[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]

Maruja Mallo’s “El racimo de uvas” (1944).Credit© The Estate of Maruja Mallo. Courtesy of Ortuzar Projects, New York.

Even within artistic circles, these women were often excluded or treated as muses to male creative genius (Dalí once described Mallo as “half angel, half shellfish”). Their work, however, insists on a different story. Mallo — who never married and who eventually stopped putting clearly identifiable men in her paintings — created a painted world that suggests a wonderfully aggressive mind in search of beauty, but unconcerned with looking pretty.
[Thessaly La Force, “The Works of These Female Surrealists Resonate Now More Than Ever,” NYTimes, 8-8-18]

[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]