Chesterton, that stout Englishman who managed to see the cosmic joke amid the Edwardian fog, put it plainly enough: the bore is the poor sod who finds nothing funny, while the clown finds everything funny.

We gotta avoid both extremes like Odysseus threading the Straits of Messina, but if I gotta err, I’m erring on the side of the clown. He’s closer to the existential mark.

Nothing about life in this vale of tears is consistent. Nothing is ultimately rational. Nothing is predictable. Our own minds deceive us 15 times before breakfast, and our steeliest aims, goals, and resolutions deflate like a ready male confronted with a picture of naked Janet Reno.

Inconsistency is the only constant. Only unreliability is reliable. Always expect the unexpected.

Humor is the proper response to all this.

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Inconsistency is the soul of humor. It juxtaposes inconsistent things. The more sudden and unexpected and harsh the juxtaposition, the funnier. It could be a man slipping on the ice (his inherent dignity slashed by his flailing efforts to regain his footing) or one of those harsh and unexpected twists that mark deadpan comic Anthony Jeselnik’s style.

“I saw my favorite porn actress at the end of the bar. . . I told the bartender he shouldn’t serve her because she’s only 13.” Jeselnik (paraphrased)

I’d take the clown option one step further these days. In this zany vale of shit that Western culture has become, the clown has become the only effective option.

We debate whether a penis belongs in a girls’ locker room and whether people should show ID to vote when they’re required to show ID in every other important area of life. People use terms like “grand-dogs” to celebrate their children’s self-inflicted sterility, “safe space” to justify neuroticism, and “love language” (a term that no self-respecting American male can hear without biting his lower lip and grabbing his crotch) to describe the only thing that makes life bearable. A blanket of governmental regulations, like 2,000-page building codes, hobble human flourishing as effectively as that fat guy sitting on a prisoner’s head in Idiocracy.

To all this, there are only two possible responses: violence or humor. Violence is abhorrent, so I’ll take humor.

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The brain’s left hemisphere is rationalistic. It only appreciates and pursues those things that the explicit reasoning process can understand. Because modern culture is so overwhelmingly left-hemispheric, rationalistic conclusions govern its operation, no matter how awful the results (cue the penis in the girls’ locker room and building codes that fuel homelessness).

We can’t apply more rationalism to it any more than we can save a gunshot victim by stabbing him repeatedly with a kitchen knife.

Enter humor. Summon the clowns. Celebrate the obscene fools at 4Chan. Embrace the absurd. Slap every building inspector with a Zen koan every time he requires an electrical outlet to be moved two-tenths of a centimeter to the left.

Zeno of Elea explained to Diogenes that movement wasn’t possible. His argument was rationally ironclad. Diogenes didn’t reply rationally. Instead, he stood up and walked around.

Diogenes was pretty clownish. He took nothing seriously. If rationality said “checkmate,” he flipped over the entire chessboard.

Such is the necessary response today when a culture-wide left hemisphere approach to the world has produced a slew of rational yet ludicrous conclusions.

You can’t respond rationally to rational conclusions, no matter how obviously wrong. You gotta first crack open the rationalist cocoon that created the safe space in the first place.

Humor is the most effective hammer. We could try slapping the person, like a Zen master whacking his disciple whenever the disciple asks a perfectly rational question, but that kind of thing is kinda frowned upon.

We could wait for grace to break open the cocoon or for the quiet influence of joyful lives well-lived to make an impression. But those things move slowly and unpredictably.

In the short term, I’m afraid the only option is to flail away at the rationalist cocoons with the hammer of humor. It’ll probably prove ineffective as well. We are, after all, dealing with self-inflicted insanity. But hey, at least we’ll be enjoying ourselves in this zany vale. That’s no small thing when public discourse gives us nothing else to enjoy.

They were “monsters” in the medievalist’s Latin jargon: monstrare: to show, display. Saint-Hilaire said the development of these baby monsters showed how normal fetal development occurs.

By seeing how monsters develop, we can better prevent monsters.

It’s like un-role models. If George Washington and St. Francis can show us how to live, that broken-down drunk at the bar and your uncle who can’t go within 200 feet of an elementary school arguably do something even more valuable: they show us how not to live.

We’re celebrating the year of the saints right now, and it’s a great thing. We should all cram a little more Butler’s into our daily regimen.

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But don’t discard those one-eyed pig fetuses in history. How did Andy Warhol become “Andy Warhol”? Did Nietzsche induce his own collapse into madness on the streets of Turin? Why did Michel Foucault repeatedly play rectal Russian roulette at the height of the AIDS culture until he caught the disease?

They’re good questions. By casting monsters into relief, we see good things better.

Yeah, I know: Many of these biographies are darker than ink spots on ebony, and damn it, life’s too hard and too short already. I doff my fleece-lined knit hat to the folks who stick with Butler’s, I really do, even during this blasted cold stretch that has deprived me of all feeling in my testicles for the past two weeks.

But here’s the thing: We’re kinda living in a world of one-eyed pigs right now. Monsters have become the norm. How else can you explain why we continue to celebrate the memory of Andy Warhol, who, Gore Vidal observed, is the only genius in history with an IQ of 60?

It’s worth figuring out how the frick we got here. It’s helpful to learn about that broken-down drunk’s first beer at age 14 and how your Registered uncle started clicking on porn sites at 12 while his parents were at work. The creepy biographies show these one-eyed pigs in development.

I suspect the exercise will start showing us a lot of one-eyed pigs in the mirror.

Modern culture infuses us with the habit of looking at the world and approaching life with only one eye: our right one, which is controlled by the left hemisphere.

McGilchrist’s three big volumes are snow globes of a culture blizzarded with left-hemispheric excess: a culture that sees with only one eye.

Once you notice that you’re approaching life with only one eye, you start seeing instances all over the place. In my case, most of those instances are in my own soul. Unsettling? Yes, very much so. I half-quip and half-quiver when I refer to myself as a recovering left-hemispheric.

My consolation? The confessional, primarily, but also Larry David. Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld made oodles of money by repeatedly showing the fragility of left-hemispheric rationalism crashing against the rock reality of the world (a reality that can only be appreciated by the right hemisphere). I figure if comedians like Larry and Jerry can joke at their own left-hemispherism, I’m not entirely lost.

I’ll give you my favorite example from my life, which could easily be adapted into a Seinfeld dialogue at Monk’s Cafe.

I’ve long practiced the fine art of ghosting. When I’ve had enough socializing, I just leave a social gathering without saying goodbye. My friends and family long ago just accepted it, and I’ve long defended or at least tried to explain it (earlier treatments: link and link).

My defense of ghosting is, as far as my left-hemispheric/rational mind can see, pretty solid.

But here’s a thing my left hemisphere doesn’t appreciate: It’s a dick thing to do.

Now, we could fall down the abyss of rationalist argumentation about why it’s a dick thing to do or not a dick thing to do, Dick and No-Dick flailing away at one another like Gandalf and the Balrog. Goodness knows, I’ve run the dick/not-dick arguments through my head for years, normally the morning after ghosting, but I never resolved it (partly because, to detour parenthetically into one of P.G. Wodehouse’s descriptions of a hangover:

There were moments when he seemed on the verge of settling the matter, and then some invisible person would meanly insert a red-hot corkscrew in the top of his head and begin to twist it, and this would interfere with calm thought. Piccadilly Jim.)

Instead of Gandalf-Balrogging, I could just relax my mind and say, “You know what? It just doesn’t feel right, so it’s probably not right, even if my rationality says it’s okay.”

And then instead of ghosting, I could simply announce I’m going to bed even though it’s only 10:15, accept the derision with whatever grace my six gin-and-tonics can muster, and retire.

It’s liberating, in a way. It’s not as immediately liberating as ghosting (damn, I loved doing that, especially in my era of youthful excess), but in the final un-analysis, it liberates as only a shrug can liberate. You cease to analyze, you cease quite frankly to care, and just submit to that intuition of what’s right and what’s wrong.

It’s the virtue of obedience, which is the virtue associated with the fourth decade of the Catholic joyful rosary. Maybe it’s not the obedience of Joseph and Mary presenting Jesus to the Temple officials, and maybe not even the obedience to God or some other cosmic power. But it’s obedience . . . to something, somewhere, and it makes life a helluva lot easier and expends far less mental energy.

And if my intuition here is right, I suspect such an approach helps remove that left-hemispheric eye from the center of our existential face.

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A few numbers:

144: The number of times an American is digitally distracted daily. (NB: it doesn’t include that extrovert co-worker who circles the office like a turkey vulture).

6.67: How many minutes, on average, pass between digital distractions (16 hours of waking time x 60 / 144).

20: How many minutes it takes to get back on task after an interruption (some say, with practice, you can reach “flow state” in ten minutes, but most of us require up to 25 minutes).

(1,920): How many focused minutes you have every day if you’re an average American (total unfocused time (144 X 20) - total minutes in the waking day (960 minutes)).

47: The normal attention span these days (in seconds).

It’s time to go Savonarola on this shit. Grab every distraction device and throw it in the bonfire. Every digital distraction is just gilded left-hemispheric vanity, a micro-temptation to prey and grasp, a bicep curl for the left hemisphere.

That’s why those digital devices are killing our souls. The stronger the rogue left hemisphere becomes, the more it suffocates the right hemisphere. This makes it a spiritual battle because the right hemisphere is our transcendental router.

But hey, if psycho-metaphysico propositions ain’t your bag, look at it from a logico-scientifico perspective:

We need sustained attention to form memories. Brain scans show that the hippocampus and other areas of our brain required for memory formation are far more active during times of sustained attention.

Memory is necessary for pretty much everything that separates us from the animals. To solve problems, make connections, regulate emotions, form relationships. Memory is, in other words, necessary to nourish the rational soul, which is, as Aquinas pointed out, the thing that separates us from the animals.

The syllogism: Memory nourishes the soul. Digital distractions cripple memory. Therefore, digital distractions cripple the soul.

So, if you don’t want your soul sucked out of your body like a UFO abducting you from that cornfield at 2:00 AM, you need to take radical steps.

Cal Newport’s deep work? I’m a fan, but does it really work? Can you take a shot of beer every 6.5 minutes for a few hours, then decide, “Okay, I’m not taking any more shots for the next 90 minutes so I can get some work done”? It’s better than nothing, and I can’t dispute the (impressive, in a warped way) abilities of functional drunks who somehow surf through life’s everyday tasks, but overall, you might as well replace those shots of beer with coffee then decide to sleep peacefully for those 90 minutes.

Kevin Majeres’ “Golden Hour” prescription? That’s getting closer. Divide the day into focus sprints. 60 minutes . . . 45 minutes . . . 90 minutes. You decide (my sweet spot seems to 75 minutes). After each sprint, take a break: five minutes . . . 15 minutes . . . 30 minutes. You decide (my sweet spot: 15 minutes). During those sprints, your phone should be in the toilet, preferably defecated upon. If you then want to look at it during your break, go ahead, but I’ve been doing those sprints for two years now, and I normally want to use those breaks for recreational reading or walking outside.

Savonarola’s bonfire of the vanities approach? I think that’s the only option, ultimately. Take that phone out of the toilet, wipe it off, then throw it in the metaphorical fire.

So how do you maintain relationships with friends and family after you’ve bonfired your phone?

I have no idea.

I already lose out on a lot of communication with my children because my phone has been in that metaphorical bonfire for over two years. They don’t even bother to text me with anything time-sensitive, and increasingly, anything at all. It’s a bummer that this brother can’t deny, but hey, when I do get the occasional text from them, I get sprung, so there’s that: each text message is welcomed instead of feeling like another drop in a drowning deluge.

IMHO, our Silicon overloads need to create a phone setting that allows trusted friends and loved ones to reach us if something is urgent. I have an analog app that does this. It’s called “The Wife.” She notifies me by dinging my phone or calling my secretary and saying, “Please get him. I don’t care if he’s in one of his work sprints or whatever the f____ he calls it. Get him.” It’s a good workaround, though I estimate that the annual subscription cost is about $50,000.

For those without that option? You’re just gonna have to figure it out for yourselves, but it can be done. Like anything, the first step is the hardest, but at least it’s obvious: Build a bonfire.

That’s not just me staring at the bottom of my sixth glass.

It’s all of us while sleeping.

After especially vigorous nights, we wake up and go, “Man, that was some wild shit.”

I heard awhile back that Muslims are converting to Catholicism because they keep having dreams of the Virgin Mary. I get the impression these aren’t “one-off” conversions. A trickle, a wave, a tsunami . . . beats me, but it happens.

Mary, mother of Jesus, pointing the way to Jesus. If you’re Catholic, you believe that’s what she does, which lends a tubful of credibility that something real is appearing to those Muslims.

If you’re a modernist, you dismiss dreams altogether. Sure, you can admit a little Sigmund into your worldview. Maybe that dream about defecating in plain view of everyone says something about your own fears, anxieties, and copro challenges. But as a pointer to anything real? That’s more inadmissible to the modern mind than a victim’s promiscuity in a rape trial.

Moderns respect what we see during the day but dismiss what we see at night.

The problem is, when we’re awake, we’re often asleep. That’s why many of the most profound noggins in history have described the mass of mankind as “sleepwalkers.”

During the day, a Mardi Gras of thoughts parade through our minds, we cringe at our past antics, we concoct hallucinations about the present and the future; frick, we even hallucinate about the past: facts recede and anachronistic current presumptions morph them into something else entirely than what actually happened.

For many of us, all that happens five times before breakfast. But it’s all sleepwalking, pointing to nothing real, except for the neuroses and ulcers that result from them.

Now, if we’re asleep while we’re awake, maybe we’re awake while we sleep. Put another way, if we’re seeing less reality than we think while we’re awake, maybe we’re seeing more reality than we think while we’re asleep.

Maybe we should give those nocturnal thoughts a little respect, like those Muslims who convert to Catholicism after seeing the Virgin Mother of God.

And maybe we should give our daytime thoughts a little less respect.

Good luck with that.

The modern world is erected on Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” It’s the dumbest-ass thing ever, but the frick if our culture hasn’t adopted it as its starting point, its default mode, and its religion. We’re taught from toddlerhood to respect our thoughts as reliable guides to reality.

But our thoughts aren’t reliable. How many times have you freaked out about something that wasn’t real, like when a friend doesn’t reply to your email only to find out that it went to his junk box, or entertaining a calamitous prediction about the future that never materializes?

How many micro-strokes triggered by imaginary things do you need before you kick that deceitful whore called “your mind” to the curb?

We’ve always given our brains too much credit. Those sages have been referring to men as “sleepwalkers” longer than a homeless guy’s been wearing the same pair of underwear.

It’s natural.

We give our brains too much credit because we need them to survive. If we don’t trust that our brains are providing at least a measure of reliable feedback, we won’t kill that mastodon to feed our family, and we won’t provide customer service to collect our weekly paycheck.

Survival: It’s first. It’s what the left hemispheres of our brains do, and they do it well.

But “first” doesn’t mean “only.” It doesn’t even mean “most important.” It’s just “first,” which, instead of being “only” or “most important,” probably is better associated with “preliminary,” as in, “Before we can get to the good stuff, we need to deal with this preliminary bullshit.”

But the modern mindset, taking its cue from Descartes, elevated the left hemisphere past “first” to “only” and “most important.”

The result?

The left hemisphere dominates.

And it’s damn awful at comprehending reality. It grasps fragments and pastes them together in a workable framework to get us through daily life, but that’s about it.

Yet we think it’s telling us everything we need to know and everything it tells us is true. That’s a major hallucination.

You can find more original essays at The Daily Eudemon, the Internet’s Longest-Suffering Blog.

Incessant small talk drains me like a deposed Nigerian prince drains your checking account after you click that link to help him in exchange for $500,000 that will be delivered to you five days after he lands in NYC. After my last dollar of energy is gone, I ghost, later texting my host an apology, saying I had to leave suddenly because my mom died again.

The righteous host tries to get in front of all that.

Righteous hosting is a small art: something worth doing for its own sake that requires the practitioner to shift focus from herself to the canvas in front of her: to the room, to her guests.

If you want to be a good host, here are tips:

1. Plan Ahead–But Stay Flexible

Three facts: (1) the left hemisphere plans, (2) things never go according to plan, (3) the left hemisphere then gets really irritated. Keep the left hemisphere on a short leash: enough to do its job but not enough to strangle your soul.

This isn’t just a hosting tip, it’s a life lesson.

2. Signal Small Ways to Tell the Guests They’re Welcomed

People are tactile. No one feels comfortable in a white box. Add decorations that fit the occasion, play appropriate background music (keep Frank Zappa in the cassette tape case). Even if you can’t understand how tactile additions enhance, they do.

3. Welcome Each Person

Your “guests” are an abstraction. Each person is a reality. Focus on the reality. And if she’s super hot, don’t leer.

4. Anticipate Needs Before They’re Voiced

Somewhere between the big box worker who assiduously avoids eye contact for fear you’ll ask where you can find the Cheerios and the neurotic host who pounces with an offer of assistance every time you adjust yourself, there’s Aristotle’s golden mean of helpfulness. Find it.

5. Invite Guests to Join In

I’m including this tip because the linked article does, but I don’t get it. It suggests that the host give guests jobs to do, like “taste the sauce” (a request, to my sensory proclivities, that’s barely better than the pig frat boy sticking his hand in my face and saying, “Smell my fingers”). I don’t think it should be incumbent on the host to find work for you. As a decent guest, notice small things that need to be done and do them.

I move on.

6. Guide the Flow–And Stay Present

The unhelpfulness of this tip ranks right up there with a coach’s advice to “go out there and win the game,” but it is a decent reminder: everything, including a simple party, is flow, and flow can only be appreciated in the present. A good host works the room like a coach makes big and small adjustments every minute of the game.

It’s All about Proper-Functioning Hemispheres

The first tip isn’t the only one that requires proper interaction between your brain’s hemispheres. All of them do. The left hemisphere channeling Martha; the right hemisphere, Mary. We can snicker at dogged Martha doing all the work, but without her, the guests walk into a lousy party.

And if Martha runs amok, the guests walk out of a lousy party.

Same piece, re-worked with a funny Seinfeld clip, here

But it didn’t take me long to realize my co-religionists from across the border could drink me under the table, pray me under the table, and work me under the table.

Especially work. Damn, can they work. Whenever the grim labor reaper shows up at their door, they spit in his eye and grab a shovel.

It reminded me of my immigrant grandpa who worked 70 hours a week during World War II as a tool and die maker, then set up his own shop in his garage so he could work during his free time. My dad said he never saw his father so happy.

If you’d asked my grandpa about his life-work balance, he probably would’ve replied that, at 90 hours a week, he had perfected it.

But I can guarantee you he never thought about life-work balance.

Today, young workers obsess about it. They refuse to be bothered after 5:00, pickleball practice takes priority over their boss, they think elaborate vacations are crucial to avoid burnout.

“Burnout” to my grandpa was what happened when you fell asleep during a break with a lit cigarette in your hand, and worrying about work burnout would’ve been like worrying about getting laid too much.

You know who else didn’t worry too much about his life-work balance during WWII?

Number 119,104. A/k/a Victor Frankl, working on Nazi railroads during the day and practicing his pickleball at Auschwitz during the evening.

Yet from the smoke and the gas of that man-made hell Frankl found meaning. He developed an entire theory of psychology from the experience: logotherapy.

In my grandpa’s micro-hell that he didn’t even recognize as hell, he found a shit-ton of money and bought a family vacation cottage on Lake Huron that my grandkids enjoy 80 years later.

I’m not saying you should work 90 hours a week, and I’m not waiting for Rod Dreher to write The Auchschwitz Option.

I am saying you need to defocus (Frankl’s word), like my grandpa as he yanked another chunk of metal onto his worktable and the survivors at Auschwitz did after being reduced to their naked existence (another Franklism).

Defocus from what?

From the vicious circle jerk formations and feedback mechanisms that make us neurotic, said Frankl. Instead of preserving our pleasures and freaking out whenever something might tread on them, we should just focus on something (defocus from ourselves), thereby breaking up the “self-centredness of the neurotic” (Frankl).

For Frankl, the focus must be on meaning.

For my grandpa, it was on surviving and thriving in America when he still could’ve been trapped in the Soviet Union (and probably living in the Gulag, which is where Stalin sent most of my grandpa’s relatives who didn’t flee the Germanic Volga region).

When a major flood hit Topeka, Kansas in 1951, the authorities got men from the local asylum, some of whom had been hospitalized for over 20 years, to haul sandbags. Their supervising psychologist was “astonished” to see them “not only loading and placing sandbags with the rest of us, but effectively supervising us in the loading and placement of the bags.” This continued for several days. When the emergency was over, the patients passed back into their deteriorated state of mind.

Meaning, work, focus. They have one thing in common: they swirl outside our f-ed up little heads.

I’ve been watching those Mexicans in my town for 25 years now.

You know where those Mexicans find meaning?

In their families. Mexicans don’t just out-work, -play, and -pray gringos. They also out-family them. When they’re not working and praying, they’re drinking . . . with their families, with their kids running around. And when they’re doing none of those things, they’re out-hanging us with their families, sometimes contentedly lounging for hours in one another’s company.

Family: It’s where tradition tells us we should find meaning.

But in a modern landscape that is set up to tear apart the family, more and more people don’t have a family to occupy their focus.

So they worry about their pickleball game.

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Eric Scheske has written for dozens of print publications. You can find more original essays at The Daily Eudemon, one of the Internet’s longest-running blogs.

Dr. Lefty Hemifear has weighed the evidence and reached a conclusion: All alcohol is bad for you.

The glass of red wine after dinner? Shill conclusions from Madison Avenue. A few belts of whiskey to unwind after a long work week? Redneck heroin.

It’s all science, so it’s all fact.

Until it’s not.

You know who’d really benefit from demonizing alcohol? The pharmaceutical companies.

Satan.

The Satans are already attacking alcohol. The GLP-1 drugs are killing people’s impulsive behaviors, including the need to have a few whacks of the good stuff before the in-laws arrive.

How many more drugs could the Satans develop and sell if they made everyone afraid of tradition’s favorite way of making this vale of tears a little less sad!

So I’m guessing the studies will continue to roll out.

It started about ten years ago, it seems, when I heard that more than seven drinks per week is bad for you. Then that number came down to four per week. Then two. Now zero: more than zero drinks per week, and you’re heading for Zombie Land without a double-pump shotgun.

That’s been Dr. Andrew Huberman’s progression. He ain’t no Establishment hack. He gives it straighter than Viagra after a large can of Red Bull.

But Dr. Lefty Hemifear? He gives it even straighter. Too straight. So straight, it’s crooked.

He dials in the science more and more, taking one little line of fact and blockchaining it to another little line of fact, breaking the little lines down more and more, then he wraps them around and connects the ends to come up with something resembling a circle.

But it ain’t a circle. It’s a shit-ton of tiny lines pasted together and wrapped around to look like a circle from a distance, but when you look close, you see it’s all f’ed-up.

That’s because Dr. Left Hemifear can’t draw a circle any more than a virgin can do high-grade work in a whorehouse.

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Back in the greasy, disco-lit haze of the 1970s and the dawn of the Reaganite ‘80s, the publishing world churned out a billion paperbacks. They were dirt cheap, some even free, handed out like girlie pamphlets on the Vegas strip.

But there was a hook: they were riddled with ads, mostly from the cigarette barons who’d been booted off the TV and radio airwaves by the sanctimonious 1969 federal advertising ban that limited Joe Camel to lumbering along the printed page only.

The public spat ‘em out like bad moonshine and the critics bayed. One critic prophesied a dystopian literary future where you’d be deep in the brooding currents of Hemingway’s Old Man or Wolfe’s electric prose, only to flip the page and confront: “Are Your Underarms Really With It?”

On paper, it was a stroke of genius. Advertisements had for years been littering the pages of magazines, many of which were filled with some of the finest writing. Why not books?

Indeed, fast-forward to today, and the whole scam’s a triumph in the digital carnival: online “reading” is just Times Square shrunk to your pocket, a blitz of blinking banners, vapid clickbait drivel. Rivers of cash sluice into the coffers of the cyber-billboard overlords.

So here we sit, our reading experiences inundated with distraction and commercials, yet nobody has dusted off the idea to put advertisements into books. It’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enema, the kind of thing that ought to jam a crowbar in the spokes of the rational mind and send it somersaulting over the handlebars into the ditch.

Nassim Taleb, that prickly Levantine sage, thinks the idea flopped because authors are artisans with their souls in the game and advertising is anti-soul. Putting them together is like putting paper with fire.

I don’t buy it.

Magazine scribblers pour their guts into those monthly dispatches, yet we swallow the ads just fine. Online content creators, too: tons of sweat and soul, yet ads confetti the online world.

On the flipside, there are a gazillion books with no soul but we won’t tolerate ads in them. There ain’t no romance hack who wouldn’t take a fiver to tweak “Her heaving bosom quivered in his callused hands” to “Her heaving bosom, snug in her Playtex bra, quivered in his Marlboro-Man like hands.”

No, it ain’t the soul that was the snag. It’s the book experience itself that recoils from the marketer’s paws. There’s a sanctity to reading a book, a whiff of the communion chalice.

That’s the thread the doomsayers are missing today in their endless keening about reading’s twilight in this pixelated perdition we call “the information age.”

Take James Marriott, one of the chief mourners, who unlimbered his self-styled magnum opus on the subject just last month.

Marriott strikes me as one of today’s leading men of reading and this essay held promise. He’s a fan of Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere hypothesis, and his essay led with a quote by Marshall McLuhan disciple Neil Postman. I was expecting something compelling.

What a letdown.

Marriott’s essay hoists the flag of the left-brain brigade: the cold calculus of rationality, the ledger-book logic of productivity, the shiny badges of success and salubrity. Books, he laments, were the great enablers of all that tidy virtue, and now, with screens gobbling our gaze, we’re adrift in entropy.

Well, if it’s all left-hemisphere hoo-ha, those ad-riddled paperbacks should’ve been a slam-dunk success. But they weren’t. That Edselian idea was concocted in the left hemispheric abstraction cooker.

Marriott’s not entirely off the beam, mind you. His jabs at the digital scrum are accurate at some level.

The problem is, his jabs are like warning the cheerleader that bedding the whole varsity squad might leave her sore in the morning. True enough, that. But there’s deeper rot at work, the kind you can’t spell out to the girl, even though you might try and, in the process, merely stack up more left-hemispheric laments for her to consider before crawling into the back of the pickup truck: the clap, the twittering and giggling whispers in the girls locker room, the ghost that haunts the memory for the rest of one’s life.

That’s Marriott’s essay: piling on the left-hemispheric laments, blind as driftwood to the McGilchrist-McLuhan undercurrents.

In his windy exegesis, he misses the heart of the matter:

Reading a book is a deeply tactile experience.

The heft, the crinkle of pages, the ink on your fingertips, even the smell of decomposing vanilla if you’re blessed enough to be reading an old book. It’s an experience, and experiences are fleshly yet intellectual, woven into sinews and breath. Experiences like reading from a book defy the scalpel of words that the intellect wields like a butter knife against the grund of reality.

The heart has reasons the head can’t understand.

And the heart is in the body.

There’s something about the book medium itself that transcends mental effort to understand. Put another way, there’s something the left hemisphere can’t appreciate about the book reading experience because it’s exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to articulate and quantify. The whole thing’s gotta be left vague.

Marriott? He jumps in, articulating all the reasons . . . and all of them like the left hemisphere warnings to that cheerleader who’s gonna be walking funny the next morning.

Online prose is everything Marriott celebrates about the book, but it’s everything on crack cocaine.

Online prose is hyper-rational, hyper-logical, hyper-productive.

Hyper-Cartesian.

Marriott oughtta crack open that McLuhan-Postman ledger again. “The medium is the message,” the old Toronto prof McLuhan growled. It’s not the piffle it peddles, but the way it changes your physical senses and kneads your nerves. “Media,” McLuhan explained, are tools that extend the individual’s physical senses which, in turn, affect him mentally. Similarly, Postman taught that every new physical tool comes with an idea embedded in it.

In the McLuhan-Postman arena, it’s all about the intertwined physical and mental experience. The crux of the matter is in the experience itself, which starts with the body.

Body, touch, soul, mind . . . all coming together in ways that we must explore slowly because our minds can’t readily grasp them. We need to recognize the physical effects that different forms of media have on us, which then affect us mentally . . . and eventually spiritually. It takes time, yes, but that’s why we oughtta embrace new technology slowly, even patiently and with caution, not like frat boys at an open bar.

Speaking of which, if you see one of those frat boys injecting vodka into his rectum to get drunk faster, don’t caution him with left-hemispheric laments like intestinal disorders and colon problems down the road. Don’t tell him he can get just as drunk by drinking the stuff normally.

No, criticize him on grounds that the rectum approach is rational: efficient, cost-effective, and logical. Hyper-so. Like online reading. In a sane world, that would be enough to shame him into pouring a decent Cabernet into a crystal snifter.

And drinking it while holding a real book.

It’s irrational, but that’s the entire point.

Part Two of Two Parts

Role models are great. We all oughtta have a few.

But don’t underestimate the anti-role models. These cautionary wraiths of consequence are more often the true educators in this carnival of folly called “modernity,” whispering not “be like me” but “For God’s sake, be anything but.”

That lean 60-year-old man playing robust basketball inspires, but that 60-year-old Marlboro Man wheezing up a half flight of stairs indicts. Self-immolation feels good when the consequences are 40 years down the road, but it don’t look so swift in real time.

Or consider the demure lady on her park bench, peacefully lost in the hush of printed pages amid the twittering pigeons and distant snarl of traffic.

Then contrast her with the Zizians, those spectral acolytes of deranged online oracles, their eyes glassy from marathon sessions of screen-glow, their minds sharpened to razors but unmoored from any ballast. These folks don’t merely warn us about the dangers of online reading: they embody the danger of dancing along the edge of the digital abyss.

Ziz herself1 read a lot, plucking her nom de guerre from the fever-dream bowels of Worm, that interminable 7,000-page web serial disgorged onto WordPress from 2011 to 2013 that the rationalist hordes lap up as holy fictional writ.

Before she was 25—the age when the cranium finally seals its leaky hull against the tempests of youth—Ziz had also mainlined the output of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s endless blog, those screeds later bundled into the 2,100 page Sequences that became the online summa of super-rationality.2

She devoured it, pixels and all.

In the definitive account of the Zizians, Oliver Conroy writes that the Zizians were “smart but not always wise” and they spent “dizzying amounts of time on the Internet” and reading massive amounts “by the glow of a computer screen.” They were idealists aflame with the riddles of rogue algorithms, says Conroy, and “too fired up solving the alignment problem to do dishes.”3

We are all, Adam Lehrer pointed out, just one errant hyperlink from another cult.

Let’s be as blunt as possible without vulgarity: Online reading is the Cartesian curse incarnate. Mind yoked to mind across a sterile void, brain severed from the rude mechanics of body, information zipping from server-farm to synapse like a telegram from the void. No mediation. Heck, no mercy. Just the cold relay of ones and zeros. Impersonal as porn.

Now, a physical book? That’s a different sort of leather.

Your arms become bridges, your hands the anchors. You heft its spine, you touch the pages, you sometimes rest it on your chest like an infant. Try that with a laptop. Kinda possible, just like it’s kinda possible to have sex with a robot, but don’t porn yourself: the laptop, no matter how intimate you think you are with it, is a slab of alienation. The book, meanwhile, roots you in the soil of sensation, calms the interior mental gale, and throttles back the frantic tick of the second hand.

The screen? All contrasts: It excites, it goads, it accelerates.

Careful reading—what Albert Jay Nock referred to simply as “reading” and what our ADD-riddled age fumbles to recover with phrases like “deep literacy”—hones the discursive reason and the ability to make logical inferences and arguments, tools that equip you in the gritty areas of real life of production and survival beyond the page.

Admittedly, online reading does the same thing.

But it does it too well.

It’s hyper-rational, hyper-logical, and hyper-productive. It’s rationality of the sort that revved Chesterton’s maniac, it’s logic to the land of lunacy, it’s as productive as a Ponzi scheme.

Don’t mistake me, now. The Zizians likely arrived at the keyboard with their minds already bent, at least a little, just as the gym rat who eyes the steroid syringe for the first time is already unhealthy at some level. The screen, like the needle, merely fans the embers of instability into a bonfire; it doesn’t plant the dry tinder in the first place.

Nor would a shelf of leather-bound tomes have rescued them from the plunge. Eric Voegelin, that sage dissector of gnostic fevers, reminded us that the cult’s hallmark is the koran—the one sacred text, the ur-document that binds the faithful in ecstatic delusion. Until recently, that totem was always a physical book, that thing I’ve been celebrating in these recent essays.

And yet!

There’s an alchemy in the physical book that no algorithm can ape. I swear it by the ink stains on my fingers. Try it yourself: sit with a book, feel its weight settle like an old friend’s hand on your shoulder, and mark how the pulse steadies, the breath deepens, the skull’s relentless static fades.

Then plop your mangy selves before the screen and witness the inverse rite: the heart jackhammers, the lungs shallow out, thoughts start racing.

The contrast is subtle as a fault line, but seismic in its verdict.

Not every soul who mainlines online prose will spiral into the cultic, any more than every chain-smoker coughs up a tumor by forty. The roulette wheel spins unevenly; some dodge the bullet through sheer dumb luck or iron constitutions.

But that doesn’t change a basic fact: they’re both arsenic in the well. They’re slow poisons guzzled under the guise of progress.

Shun the Zizian path.

Ditch the digital cigarette.

And for the love of all that’s analog and alive, set down the glowing idol. Pick up a book. Let its pages remind you that the world still turns on hinges of paper and patience, not hyperlinks and hubris.

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Footnotes

Everyday Neurology 101: The right hemisphere receives sensory input, feeds it to the left hemisphere for processing, receives a report from the left hemisphere, synthesizes it, feeds its synthesis back to the left hemisphere for more processing, which reports back, and on and on until a decision is made.

This “lateralization” occurs rapidly, but in a hea…

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Excuse me, while I rail against the gods while worshipping at their altar.

I’ve bought five Kindles over the years, giving two to my daughters, a testament to my enthusiasm for these devices.

Amazon’s Kindle license agreement allows it to “remotely manage, update, or remove Digital Content from your Kindle device or reading application at any time.”

I mark…

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Smooth makes things rough. Ease makes life more difficult. Soft makes us brittle.

We lost something when asphalt replaced cobblestone. Every step on those old, gnarled stones forced a man’s body to shift, recalibrate, and work. The more cobblestonish the surface, the more micro-exertions. The more asphaltish the surface, the fewer micro-exertions.

Read more

Picture a man, tattered coat flapping, rummaging through a dumpster in an alley. You wince, don’t you? That flicker of disgust ripples through your gut.

But hold on. Don’t judge him too harshly. He’s not much different from a stray dog, sniffing for scraps.

That’s not my line; it’s Albert Jay Nock’s, that old curmudgeonly godfather of the modern liberta…

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Thomas Jefferson amassed the largest library in America. Fifteen thousand volumes, according to Paul Johnson.

Books were expensive: expensive to produce and expensive to import from Europe.

Jefferson paid for the books by accumulating massive debt, which he repaid with his slave’s labor and, upon his death, his slave’s bodies: his executor was unable to f…

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Picture this: Four Sikhs stride into a title office to close a deal to buy a convenience store. Two elders had beards flowing like an Old Testament prophet. Nothing new there.

But the two young Sikhs? Their golf shirts were stretched taut over bulky biceps and pecs. I’ll confess, the sight tickled me, though I couldn’t pin down why.

For millennia, the hum…

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Our spit’s in the walls, sure, but we didn’t design the daggone things. We were born into them, raised in them, schooled in their claustrophobic embrace until we forgot what fresh air smells like.

These cocoons feel like home…

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The churches once held the line too, but many—mainline Protestants, Jesuits, and their ilk—capitulated long ago, seduced by the siren song of a…

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Young folks, especially, ain’t lingering with each other, not in the aimless, sprawling way that used to stitch souls together.

The fallout’s grim: depression’s up, suicide’s high, and a sour malaise hangs over the land like smog over a dying mill town.

I used …

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It’s because we’re starving. Starving for focus, a kind of attention that doesn’t dissolve into a TikTok scroll or a dopamine hit from the all-mighty algorithm.

…

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Few things are more degrading than being a child of the modern age.

“Prison wife” comes closest.

It ain’t our fault we were born into this asphalt dystopia of algorithms and plastic. But we can claw our way out. We can break the chains. The trick is knowing what you’re escaping from, lest you just flail like some half-cocked jihadi spraying buckshot in a …

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