First of all, thanks to Dave Lull for sending me a link to this article by Stephen Hunter. If you’re not aware that I consider Hunter one of the truly great thriller writers of our time, you must be new here (in which case, welcome. Our membership fee is reasonable, and may be wired directly to my personal bank account). Apparently Hunter had a heart attack recently. Take care of yourself, Stephen! I still haven’t gotten over losing John D. MacDonald!
Today it got up to +16° (-9 Centigrade), and it was wonderful. Needless to say, if yesterday had been 25°, it would have been terrible. I’ve said before (why haven’t you quoted me yet?) that there are only two temperatures in the Northern Plains in the winter—colder than yesterday and warmer than yesterday. I don’t approve, but it’s true.
I hate the Subjective. It’s hard to get away from it, though. Modern society has placed the Subjective on the cultural altar where the Bible used to rest, so questioning it has become a sort of contemporary heresy (as Clarence Thomas learned during his Supreme Court confirmation process). Making everything Subjective is easy, because it requires nothing more than experience, and we’ve all got some of that. No thought is necessary. Plus, it’s popular. A hard combination to fight.
Einstein is supposed to have explained his Special Theory of Relativity by saying that time spent sitting on a sofa with a beautiful girl on your lap passes much faster than time spent sitting on a hot stove. Maybe it’s an apocryphal story. If he did say it, I can’t believe he was serious. The watch on my wrist, the instrument which measures whatever time is, doesn’t change its pace based on where I’m sitting. A scientist observing my watch would note that the hands moved at a consistent pace. And that’s how science works, blast it.
So I don’t buy it.
And if you disagree, well, that’s your reality. Don’t you dare impose it on me.
I hate to say this Lars, but you’re definitely wrong here. Time passes much more slowly when you’re rewriting than when you’re doing a first draft.
I miss Travis McGee.
I think I like rewriting better than first drafts, personally. Coming up with a first draft is like self-surgery. Re-writing is mostly polishing, organizing. Much less angst-inducing.
I dunno, I like to be hopeful.
Moral subjectivity is, in the end, boring and impotent. For obvious reasons, very few philosophers actually subscribe to it any more (after all….non-relativity is what gives them job security.) Not that what is interesting is true, just that interest gives something an inherent force and fascination.
I think you can see a similar trend in Westerns. The Man with No Name trilogy was exceedingly popular for its destruction of traditional morality–everything is glamorous shades of immorality. Since then, shooting the evil sheriff has become practically a cliche.
Yet where do you go when the new wears off? 3:10 to Yuma showed one possibility. Ben Wade, the bible-quoting nihilist, simply isn’t interesting enough to fill the centerpoint of the movie. In the end, he’s fascinated with Dan Evans, and the far more interesting complexities of a seemingly weak man who holds absolutely to his moral values simply (or mostly) because it’s the Right Thing to Do.
Maybe Einsteinian physics is a good analogy, though, after all. Despite his sense of humor, what he really meant was that we have understood the universal rules in a way that oversimplifies the universe, and that “the mind of God” is something a man can spend his life trying to figure out and never fully succeed. Time, rather than being purely common-sensical, follows complex rules that differ based on your position and velocity within the galaxy–and only God fully understands everything at once.
Of course, if popular physicists had applied that the way popular ‘moralists’ applied ‘moral relativity,’ watches would be considered a quaint anachronism and we’d wonder why God made a world where it is so hard to meet with each other at the same time.