Dear T,
Chamfort once wrote, in the beginning to his Maxims and Thoughts,
Maxims and axioms, like abridgments, are the work of clever men who seem to have labored for the use of mediocre or lazy minds. The lazy man is content with a maxim that spares him from making for himself the observations that led its author to the conclusion he now shares.
With all due respect, I disagree. The whole fun of reading an essay is compressing its truth into a maxim. The whole fun of reading a maxim is turning its truth into an essay.
There is a sense in which he’s right, however. The boob who reads a maxim may stop only for a second and move on; but a thinker just gets a light tapping of the spurs: the maxim goads him on where he would have stood still, and leads to a train of thoughts he probably wouldn’t have had. (At least not right then). He begins thinking of points and counterpoints, rules and exceptions, anecdotes, old fights, old failures, old flings. Either way he isn’t a bum; he's a hitch-hiker. He’s just here to catch a free ride from the writer. And isn’t that the point of reading? To think something you wouldn't have thought? To feel something you wouldn't have felt?
Below I wrote a series of maxims that anyone can take seriously or unseriously — a shot to the heart or a ricochet off cold stone. They were fun for me to write and I hope they’re fun for you to read. Either way, they’re meant to chew; and whether they can be savored will be determined not just by the tongue, but by the jaw — in other words, not just by whether your taste is delicate enough, but by whether or not you can swallow them.
Yours,
-J
October 6th, 2026
Head of the household.
All the arguing about equality in marriage ignores personality and is thus almost completely irrelevant. If a woman is the dominant personality in the relationship, she doesn’t need it. If she’s the submissive, she doesn’t want it.
Goal and byproduct.
Mark Twain once said in a letter to William Howells,
Every great invention takes a livelihood away from 50,000 men--& within ten years creates a livelihood for half a million. But you can’t make Labor appreciate that: he is laboring for himself, not the breadless half million that are issuing from his loins. They are somebody else’s children; he fails to reflect that his own are among them.
It’s said that Milton Friedman, when told that a canal project was a jobs program, once replied, then why not use spoons?
The problem of capitalism is, how do I get something done as easily and cheaply as possible? Making sure most men are fed and kept busy is the big concern of government.
The miracle is that capitalism has gained without trying what government has tried without gaining.
Heresy.
In the Age of Faith, we were more likely to believe a victim was a sinner.
In the Modern Age, we are more likely to believe a sinner is a victim.
Gist.
The essence of life isn’t just being or doing or having: it is longing. You are what you want.
Promise and delivery.
The Psalmist says delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.
The universe is fundamentally good — if you want the greatest thing it has to offer.
A dangerous game.
In The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo says to Gadalf,
I should like to save the Shire, if I could – though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don’t feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.
We all know that what the Shire needs is something perilous to straighten it out. The problem is, the thing we need to straighten us out is very likely to be something that ruins us. We never know whether real growth ends in a death or a rebirth. And we can never be sure whether our hatred for the Shire’s follies is just love in disguise.
We can’t stand our spiritual weakness — and we are afraid of what makes for spiritual greatness.
Experience and jurisprudence.
Why does Paul say the saints will judge the angels?
I can only think of one reason — that we have been through more shit and, occasionally, have even overcome it.
Let there be life.
David Foster Wallace writes about tennis in Both Flesh and Not,
Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war. The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.
Of course, in men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty, or grace, or the body. Men may profess their “love” of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive stats and technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc. For reasons that are not well understood, war’s codes are safer for most of us than love’s.
What Wallace did here is to make tennis interesting: something not too unlike what what God did when he breathed life into the dirt. Proof that writing isn't life itself — it is to make life more colorful, to give us new perspectives, to help us untangle knots, to take a deep breath of fresh air.
To read bad books is to miss a part of yourself; to ignore a great writer, same thing.
A house divided.
I am legion is only for demons. This implies a common direction, a nefarious purpose, a strength in numbers.
For a man’s many moods and drives, it’s more like I am Congress.
Failure or Niche?
Black and Christian movies have one thing in common: that nobody wants to watch either of them except (respectively) Black people and Christians.
Species and genus.
It’s said that oranges and reds don’t stand out to deer: hence the bright orange vests on hunters.
The difference between humans and animals here is less stark than the difference between one man and another. One sees folly and another sees wisdom; one sees fun and another sees danger. Between one man and another is a chasm wider than between an lion and a rat.
Ego.
It’s easier for a man to admit he’s a sinner than to admit he’s a boob.
Cat in a bath.
Homes and medical care and education have gotten drastically more expensive — during the same generations in which the government tried to make them affordable.
What this proves is that people will read anything, from war to history to theology, before they touch economics. Americans will understand God before they understand the market.