Category: blog

Never weep, never weep. With clear eyes explore the pit.

Sometime at the last gasp comes peace 
To every soul. 
Never to mine until I find out and speak 
The things that I know.

Welcome to Near-Earth Object, a website, newsletter, and podcast (coming soon!) by me, Paul Fidalgo. These are the falling years.

First, an introduction.

This is a project through which I, an odd duck, work through the problem of how to be a person in the world. That’s it. Through written and spoken words, my own and those of others, I try to figure out what to think, what to believe, and how to feel. And then I publish it for the public, which is frankly the most dubious part of this whole enterprise.

As I hope you’ve guessed, the name Near-Earth Object is not about things that float in space. It’s about the experience of being part of something — be it a family, a society, or a species — while also being slightly outside of it. It’s about being part of a cosmic system, but in an erratic orbit.

This newsletter is intended to serve as a regular conduit between me and whoever else out there who might find value in watching this process unfold. I’ll certainly highlight my own work and happily direct you to it, but it will also be an opportunity for me to share thoughts and ideas I’ve collected from other sources, old and new. The format is known as a “newsletter,” but it will not be “newsy.” While commentary and reflection on current events is unavoidable, my hope is that any edition of this publication could be read by someone in the far future and found as worthy of their time and attention as it would be the day it was published.

Speaking of these times…

The tagline of this project, “These are the falling years,” and the lines — that appear at this newsletter’s opening — I read at the show’s opening, all come from a poem by Robinson Jeffers written around 1940 titled “For Una.” In it, Jeffers writes about a stone tower he had built for his wife, a place of solitude and sanctuary for the two of them and an expression of his love for her. But he is writing while processing the apocalyptic horrors of the Second World War, which at the time must truly have felt like the end of all things.

I’m beginning this project in the autumn of 2020, the Lost Year. This is my personal creative endeavor, and it’s happening against the backdrop of the anxiety, fear, disappointment, disillusionment, and despair of our current age, and there’s no getting away from that. These truly are falling years.

And though I am an odd duck, I am not a young one. According to actuarial tables, I’ve just kicked off the second half of my life, meaning I have fewer days ahead of me than I do before. I am a near-Earth object in a descending orbit. These are *my* falling years, too.

“Never weep, never weep,” wrote Robinson Jeffers. Well, I certainly won’t tell you not to weep. But there is much to see and much to say in between the tears.

Thanks for taking the time. If you’re still interested, read on.

Oh, and, of course, subscribe. Please. And then tell everybody to do the same.

As of about 10pm Eastern on June 3, 2020, here are a few things I think need to happen to push things in the right direction, in no particular order:

Mark Zuckerberg should resign from Facebook. The United States is in its worst moment of crisis in generations and Facebook, the most powerful outlet of information in the world, is complicit in bringing us to this point. Zuckerberg has proven time and again that he is incapable of either grasping the damage Facebook’s business model has done to society, nor of developing the conscience or empathy required to do something about it. I have no illusions about “shutting down Facebook,” as it is too much like a public utility, for better or worse. Rather, the wretched man who has enriched himself by giving growth hormones to misinformation and incitements to violence needs to walk away. He is a cancer on democracy.

The New York Times editorial board, every single member thereof, should resign in shame over the publication of Sen. Tom Cotton’s celebration of fascism, itself an incitement to additional violence against black Americans. From propping up the phony justifications for the Iraq war to treating the Hillary Clinton email controversy as the defining scandal of the 2016 election, this group of quislings has utterly failed this country. Let this be the last time.

Speaking of the catastrophe that was the Iraq war, President George W. Bush has made some kind noises about unity and ending racism, and that’s all well and good. But the only truly useful thing he can do at this moment in history is to go in front of the cameras and endorse Joe Biden for president. If he’s not going to do that, there’s literally nothing he has to say that is of any value whatsoever.

The above also goes for Mitt Romney and any other Republicans of national prominence who have any shred of conscience or patriotism left in their tattered souls.

Democratic leaders in Congress should…do…something. Anything. Fucking christ, something.

The vice president and the cabinet should invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment and remove Trump from power. I know, I know, but I had to at least say it.

This list may be updated as things occur to me.

alan jacobs on the commonplace book:

Commonplace books became widely used in the early modern period, largely because literate people were discombobulated by the flood of information that the printing press had unleashed on them. (One 17th-century writer wailed, “We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.”) Some of these were just scrapbooks, the predecessors of today’s Everything Buckets, as Alex Payne has called them — applications like Evernote or DEVONthink — and would be places to store recipes, notes from sermons, remedies for common maladies … you know, everything.

But the other kind of commonplace book was different. Its goal was to gather a collection of the wisest statements, usually of the ancients, for future meditation. And here the key thing was to write the words in your own hand — by this means, by laboriously and carefully copying out the insights of people smarter than you, you could absorb and internalize their wisdom. Call it osmosis-by-handwriting. (Some people would copy out whole books by their favorite writers in the hopes of achieving some kind of voodoo transference of power.)

and elsewhere he says:

I think I can hazard this claim: Keeping a commonplace book is easy, but using one? Not so much. I started my first one when I was a teenager, and day after day I wedged open books under a foot of my ancient Smith-Corona manual typewriter and banged out the day’s words of wisdom. I had somewhat different ideas then of what counted as wisdom. The mainstays of that era—Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan were perhaps the dominant figures—haven’t made any appearances in my online world. But even then I suspected something that I now know to be true: The task of adding new lines and sentences and paragraphs to one’s collection can become an ever tempting substitute for reading, marking, learning, and inwardly digesting what’s already there. And wisdom that is not frequently revisited is wisdom wasted.

joel l. daniels, a book about things i will tell my daughter:

make the choice to be a better you, and live in that truth, you are that truth. you are the love you need, the water you need, the nourishment you need, the things you have desired, have wanted and wished and dreamed and prayed and asked for, have prayed god’s hands apart for, all reside within. i beg you to dig deeper, dig harder, dig longer for the answer that lies right at the tip of you. a million and one fireflies circling your light-beams, who knew? who knew the arches in your feet, the disproportionate parts of your self, the dips, the dents, the density of your skin, the weight of it, the volume and mass of your skin, could be the thing. you are the thing, merely a mirror you are, a magnetic reflection, a beacon bouncing back what is needed to be brought forward.

I come with glad tidings, of a world made free. … [Free from] Freedom. Freedom is life’s great lie. Once you accept that, in your heart, you will know peace.

…

Is not this simpler? Is this not your natural state? It’s the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life’s joy in a mad scramble for power. For identity. You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel.

– the avengers (2012)

Seneca, to Lucilius:

I have withdrawn not only from men, but from affairs, especially from my own affairs; I am working for later generations, writing down some ideas that may be of assistance to them. There are certain wholesome counsels, which may be compared to prescriptions of useful drugs; these I am putting into writing; for I have found them helpful in ministering to my own sores, which, if not wholly cured, have at any rate ceased to spread.