The Weekend Eudemon
We'll have an abbreviated Weekend Eudemon this time. It's Michigan Week, it's May, it's busy at the office, it's a wonder we have any eudemon at all.
But we do. This Weekend Eudemon was written Friday evening, after attending Michigan Week festivities downtown on U.S. 12. For the first time in fifty years, that historical highway has been shut down over night to accommodate a carnival celebration.
Eric's office sits on U.S. 12. He decorated the front windows of the building with Elvis paraphernalia in the morning. At 4:30, his wife came downtown with the seven children. They walked around, drinking Miller Lite from big Styrofoam cups while the kids downed candy, pizza, pop, and rides. The Styrofoam cups are necessary due to Michigan's fascist-like liquor laws that equate drinking a beer on public streets with indecent exposure (both misdemeanors, albeit of possibly different degrees). The Miller Lite is necessary because Eric's doctor has proscribed beer until further notice.
Today is the Michigan Week parade. Five in-laws are traveling here from Detroit. We'll watch the parade, drink (lite) beers from the office lawn (which sits next to the carnival, but being privately owned, stands outside the liquor law's reach). After that, we'll head back home for swimming and (lite) beer and music and (lite) beer. It promises to be a nice day.
The Punchy Journal
. . . And perhaps the most Jacobin-ish thing of the car: its noise.
The noise is pervasive. I spend a lot of time in my study. It's downstairs, no windows, door shut. If I were to burrow out of the study wall directly in front of me, I'd be in the back yard of my house, which sits on a relatively-still residential street. It's surely one of the most isolated places in my town. Yet occasionally the grinding gears of the car or its cranked stereo breaks through.
But I can't blame the car for all the noise. Lots of things kill silence.
That's because silence is no longer a valued commodity. Its presence has been squelched–by engines, stereos, chain saws, jet skis, law mowers.
Silence, I'd argue, is crucial to mental and emotional health. In silence, we regroup, collect ourselves. Without silence, we are scattered, scarcely capable of rising to great or holy feats.
If I'm right about the importance of silence, we have serious problems with our contemporary condition, of which the pervasiveness of the car is merely one of the more abrupt manifestations.
So I hate the car, right?
Naw.
But extolling the benefits of the car in modern America would be like extolling the virtues of Ronald Reagan at a Republican convention. Why bother?
There are many things I like about the car and a modern society that accommodates it, but it helps to be aware of its shortcomings. When a good thing's shortcomings are understood, the good thing's goodness can be maximized.
A few quotes about silence from Max Picard:
"Silence puts man to the test."
"That is what silence itself is: holy uselessness."
"The mark of the Divine in things is preserved by their connection with the world of silence."
"The man who lacks the substance of silence is oppressed by the all-too-many things that crows in upon him every moment of his life today."
