The Sovereign Artist—Episode #7
Searching for Discipline & The Philosopher’s Guide to Wine & Musings on Boredom & The Art of Reflection & more
Hello friends,
Happy New Year 🎉
And welcome to Episode #7 of The Sovereign Artist series.
Sweet reminder that the SA Newsletter is the ONLY project on the Internet where you’re able to witness how someone writes a book in public. This is the playground that gives me the freedom to organize my research, exercise my creativity, and seek feedback 🥂
In the last couple of months, I’ve felt the urge to read quite a few (maybe too many) books—ranging from extremely specific subjects (such as the history and culture of Transylvanian Saxons) to general works of philosophy (anything I could find by Montaigne, Chesterton, and Nicolás Gómez Dávila) and finally a little bit of fiction by Umberto Eco and Alain de Botton.
What I learned about myself is that my favorite type of books either have an epistolary character or are written in the form of journals and notebooks. The transparency you find in such works is simply unmatched. This is what I find seductive... I get access to virgin meditations, thought experiments, and confessions!
Emil Cioran has written some of the best letters I’ve ever read to his friends and family; Mircea Eliade, his intellectual comrade, also assembled a few therapeutic journals—maybe one toxic trait I have is that I thoroughly enjoy the parts where he had the guts to attack, with great style and elegance, thinkers such Freud or Tolstoy; and my bet is that we’re unable to grasp the real value of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks—it’s a miracle that they survived in such great condition.
It probably makes more sense to approach the research process systematically and thus only choose to read books directly related to the main subject of my book. I tried to do this at some point. Two of such books are The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd and The Good Enough Job by Simone Stolzoff—I highly recommend both.
That was the plan. Here’s how it worked out:
The books I expected to get the least output from (meaning: notes, comments, and insights useful for my book) turned out to be the most fruitful. And the books directly related to the theme of my book (such as The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd) barely produced any dividends.
The difference between “reading” and doing “research” is similar to the difference between “leisure” and “work”—you turn pleasure, something playful and nourishing into a form of slavery and suffering.
It’s safe to say that I’ve been wasting so much time reading to delay the writing process. No debates here—this is indeed a form of procrastination! I tried to fight this in the beginning. Yet it felt more natural to give it a chance, to allow procrastination to be in the driver’s seat and finish the job. The result? What felt like leisure—and at times wasted time—turned into crisp, well-decorated essays and aphorisms.
In hindsight, I worked hard; I read and wrote enough. The “problem” is that it felt like play. And I have a compelling argument to prove that: there were days when I spent 6-9 hours/day locked in my office, writing and reading unceasingly in a fasted state—I only drank water and black coffee. The only way you can possibly enjoy such deep work sessions is when your work feels like play. Otherwise, if it feels like work, you have to rely on herculean levels of discipline to focus on something for so long… I thus want to take this chance to redefine discipline—or at least help upgrade its meaning—and turn it into a by-product of wild, undomesticated, undirected, and genuine curiosity rather than a conscious effort to “suffer” and delay gratification ad infinitum.
Here are 3 aphorisms, 1 essay, and 2 quotes to reflect on (about the art of reflection)
3 Aphorisms
I.
Only the unscheduled life is worth living.
What doesn’t allow you to live the way you want to live is the belief that you “have” to accomplish what you’re “supposed” to do instead of simply following your genuine interests and curiosity.
Naval Ravikant has a great motto: “I’d rather be bored than busy.”
The best “strategy” I use in order to stay consistently fulfilled is to bake boredom into my life in a completely non-negotiable way. I learned that, by constantly setting goals, drafting plans, and committing to plenty of different tasks—you slowly kill your soul. Too much structure turns you into a boring machine.
Once you learn to trust your curiosity—you’re no longer the driver but the vehicle. Curiosity takes the lead, like a divine force.
Being a slave to your curiosity paradoxically sets you free.
II.
Even Michalengelo would have trouble getting out of bed if he had nothing but a day of spreadsheets ahead.
It’s hard to imagine Leonardo da Vinci working for a corporation or being a government bureaucrat.
If your projects lack flavor and you have no skin in the game—your body will not produce energy. You will procrastinate.
H/T Jash Dholani
III.
We work hard and for long hours to reap the benefits that may only be enjoyed occasionally—during strict intervals or whenever they got scheduled in the (sometimes very distant) future:
We’re waiting for the weekend, next vacation, or retirement!
This makes us end up with a chronic condition…
We constantly postpone the zest and will to enjoy life.
Sipping Wine with Plato
My goal with this essay is not to downplay the risks of alcohol or make fun of people who got addicted to this substance. My grandfather died because of alcohol; and, sadly, quite a few people from my family also struggle with this addiction. This is indeed a widespread problem in Romania but also across the Balkans. I’m not declaring this to ask for sympathy or affection but to make you understand that I’m aware of how destructive alcohol can be. Please note that this essay is dedicated to wine and wine only and not to alcohol in general. Also note that this is not an original essay but an invitation to read I Drink Therefore I am by Roger Scruton.
There’s a bizarre form of virtue-signaling that went somewhat viral on the Internet—which is influencers feeling superior because they’ve been sober/haven’t been drinking any alcohol for months or years.
Plato famously said that “nothing more excellent or valuable than wine was ever granted by the gods to mankind.” If you get offended by this innocent tribute to pleasure, the chances are, you make the same mistake both the hedonist and the abstainer make: you regard wine as a drug and not as a drink.
Many would be in favor of prohibiting alcohol. As we know, however, prohibition doesn’t work. The real question is not whether we must drink alcohol but which, why, and how.
What intrigues me is that the ancients had a solution to the alcohol problem, which was to wrap the drink in religious rituals—gradually, under the discipline of prayer and theology, wine was tamed from its orgiastic origins to become a sacred drink.
The religious solution isn’t the only one; there’s also a secular version. Instead of excluding wine from society, the Ancient Greeks built a new society around wine. They were human too and used to overindulge and get drunk, like Odysseus’s crew in Circe’s palace. They also experimented with a period of prohibition, recorded in the Bacchae of Euripides, that turned out to be unsuccessful.
The best experiment they carried out was, like many things in life, surprising and counterintuitive. This experiment, notable as the title of a work by Plato, is the underrated symposium, a drinking party that has clear rules and guidelines.
Roger Scruton came up with a great description:
“The symposium would invite Dionysus, god of wine, into a ceremonial precinct. Guests, garlanded with flowers, would recline two to a couch, propped on their left arm, with food on low tables before them. Manners, gestures, and words were as strictly controlled as at the Japanese tea ceremony; everyone was allowed to speak, recite, or sing, so that conversation remained always general.”
It may be useful to consider that Leonardo da Vinci, Epicurus, Cato, Montaigne, and even Kant were great lovers of wine.
Of course we’re aware of the medical opinion that a daily glass of wine is good for one’s health; and also with the rival opinion that drinking more is not healthy. This is not unimportant—but as long as this is detached from the symposium culture, it doesn’t make much of a difference.
Roger Scruton wrote:
“Most people no longer have an arsenal of topics, books, poems, songs, and ideas with which to entertain one another in their cups. They drink to fill the moral vacuum generated by their culture. And while we’re familiar with the side-effects of drinking on an empty stomach, we’re now witnessing the far worse effects of drinking on an empty mind.”
If you’re against alcohol in general, you likely think of a scenario where people drink the wrong alcohol in the wrong quantities with the wrong people for the wrong reasons and in the wrong contexts.
But if you really want to insist on arguing that drinking wine is a vice, let’s take a brief detour to the Ottoman hookah/shisha. My observation is that the greatest difference between smoking cigarettes and hookah/shisha is that consuming the latter entails some sort of pseudo-ritual while the former is a banal, mundane activity.
If you want to smoke shisha, there’s a set of steps and rules you need to abide by. You make a conscious decision to meet up with your friends in a specific place; you get some tea and NEVER alcohol—the rule is simple: you’re allowed only ONE vice. Namely, the vice you came for. You never combine vices (I have a friend from Istanbul who’s fed up with Russian tourists smoking shisha and drinking vodka at the same time; he has a point though: Russians + Vodka + Shisha sounds like a terrible combination) and, finally, the experience requires thoughtful preparation. When the hookah is ready, you acknowledge its presence; a beautiful device that catches your attention.
In contrast, cigarettes—first of all, they taste like crap—are all too convenient, too easy to get and consume. They’re designed to make you build a habit that can be picked up anytime and anywhere. As Thomas Jefferson was surely right to argue that “wine is the best antidote to whiskey,” my friends from Istanbul have the right to argue that “shisha is the best antidote to cigarettes.”
Similarly, the symposium Plato wrote about entails only ONE “vice” and a ritual that needs to be respected.
The greatest revenge against a culture that doesn’t know how to drink alcohol is not to give up on it altogether and “go sober” but learn how to enjoy it and integrate it into a lifestyle packed with love, friendship, prudence, and joy. One rule I have is that a good wine should never be enjoyed alone; and it must always be accompanied by a good topic.
At the risk of getting canceled, my position is that if you truly enjoy wine—then enjoy it! Guilt is unnecessary. And note that prudence and pleasure are best friends, not enemies. This is not a medical opinion; this is for the soul. Wine—drunk in moderation at the right time, in the right place, and the right company—is the path to meditation, peace, and philosophy.
2 Quotes to Reflect on
“We don’t learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.” — John Dewey
“Experience isn’t what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.” — Aldous Huxley
Wrapping up...
Hope you liked this episode!
Any feedback, suggestion, or criticism is welcome: feel free to reply (if you got this in your inbox) or send an email to viziandrei@outlook.com
Thank you for your time,
Vizi Andrei