Facebook in the morning
Dear S,
Nietzsche had so much respect for his own mind that he didn’t want to adulterate himself with anyone else's. He says Early in the morning, when day breaks, when all is fresh, in the dawn of one’s strength — to read a book at such a time is simply depraved!
My take is, your mind is either on rails or off them; and if you have a chance to give yourself a flavor for the day, to build your life on shabby things or grand ones, to arm yourself against the worst parts of yourself and the world, why not partner up with someone great? And why not do it first thing, before something you wouldn’t choose seizes you itself?
You can live alone in your mind if you like, but a mind alone has cobwebs and mice and sewage there too — I don’t give in to the idea that my house is swept and scrubbed and orderly; that everything that comes from me is better than everything that comes from them. What I bring to the table could be something good or something horrible or something frivolous; and if I want to kick myself up a notch, what harm is there in that? Something is going to live in me — I would rather it be Montaigne, or Solomon, or Saint Paul than Fox News, or Andrew Tate, or me all by myself.
Speaking of Montaigne, he says almost the opposite of Nietzsche,
Lately when I retired to my home, determined so far as possible to bother about nothing except spending the little life I have left in rest and seclusion, it seemed to me I could do my mind no greater favor than to let it entertain itself in full idleness and stay and settle in itself, which I hoped it might do more easily now, having become weightier and riper with time. But I find that, on the contrary, like a runaway horse, it gives itself a hundred times more trouble than it took for others, and gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose, that in order to contemplate their ineptitude and strangeness at my pleasure, I have begun to put them in writing, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself. (Donald Frame translation)
Thus Nietzsche and Montaigne both have their own takes on a good morning; but if I could combine the worst of both I would start myself on social media. There I would feed myself lots of frivolous thoughts, one after another, like an unstable mind already off the rails. I would put myself on a train-track to everywhere — which would take me nowhere, or in all likelihood, some place much worse. The freshness of my brain would be worn down by a barrage of random pictures and statements and videos; I would be inundated, most likely, by alternating feelings of lust and rage and disgust; and, so cheapened, would waltz out my bedroom door to confront my own family with little to offer them: much less of the best parts of myself, certainly, and much more of the worst parts of the world.
The constant changing of one cheap idea to another doesn't even let you run with a cheap idea: it ruins you for almost all ideas. You get turned on and off to so many unconnected feelings and thoughts that you can’t keep feeling or even remember the important ones; and you can’t chew on them long enough to really put your best self into them. And this means the things your feelings are for — guidance and action — get thrown by the wayside; not so you can do better things, but so that you can have more feelings you can’t do anything with. And that’s if the feelings social media feeds you are worth having in the first place.
The worst part is, other people pick these feelings for you. You don’t get to even decide which subject you’ll chew on: a whole smorgasbord is thrown at you by every single dumbass you added on Instagram: every smug white childless liberal, every lousy coworker, every deadbeat stoner from high school; and as iron sharpens iron, your soul gets blunted by an unrelenting hailstorm of other people’s half-baked ideas. What you’re witnessing is a stampede of runaway souls — and you placed yourself right in their path. Do you even want to be like most of these people? Do your want their thoughts to be your thoughts? Are they even funny, or beautiful, or wise, or handy? You know the answer; and if this seems insulting, it was in your brain before I brought it up.
So do yourself a favor: pick someone you admire and put their soul into yours first. I made a whole list of greats earlier, but try Montaigne first thing in the morning (Frame translation, of course), or Plato, or the Bible; and if good company fails, just be alone with God.
But don't trust three things when you wake up. Never read the news. Never play a video game. And above all, never trust the public.
Yours,
-J
P.S. A fuller quote of Nietzsche sheds more light on his position,
Scholars who at bottom do little nowadays but thumb books — philologists, at a moderate estimate, about 200 a day — ultimately lose entirely their capacity to think for themselves. When they don’t thumb, they don’t think. They respond to a stimulus (a thought they have read) whenever they think — in the end, they do nothing but react. Scholars spend all of their energies on saying Yes and No, on criticism of what others have thought — they themselves no longer think. […] Early in the morning, when day breaks, when all is fresh, in the dawn of one’s strength — to read a book at such a time is simply depraved! (Kaufmann translation).
I'll offer one objection here, and it’s that all thinking is a reaction. You don’t have a choice to “just be,” free of anything else — you’re either pulling material out of what’s happened to you or what you saw or heard from somebody else. So why not react to the best material? The richest stories, the most interesting observations, the most beautiful theories are all there, waiting for you to pick them up. You yourself are one man — but you’re part of mankind, and the whole point of writing is to make your soul mesh with another. The question is always, whose soul?
You can reach for the Tree of Knowledge or you can bring a ladder. You can either swim to the Holy Land or take a plane there. You decide how much time it takes, and how painful the trip is, and whether you ever actually arrive. But if you want to "stand on the shoulders of giants” (as they say) first recognize that you're a midget; and if you recognize you’re a midget, and you’re looking to stand on some bigger person’s shoulders, then I submit you're already taller than the other midgets around you — and aside from watching them fail, they probably don’t have much to offer you on Facebook.
But be fair, too: always ask yourself, in the end, whether you have anything great to offer them.
I love what you did here.