[WITI No. 63] Intro to Montaigne, maybe...you made me a terrorist, be very afraid of...a Koala?

Hi, friends, it’s me, George. Thanks for reading. We might have met online or IRL. Welcome to my weekly newsletter where like Keanu Reeves instead of asking what is the Matrix? Instead, I ask What Is The Information? Here I usually write about what I’m reading or what audiobook I’m listening to and how to turn that into wisdom I can pass along to my kids. I also write about tax debt here, if that’s how you found me. Sometimes, I share interesting bits from the internet too.

Welcome!

One bit of housekeeping, in the coming weeks, I plan to purge this list and move to a different newsletter provider. The list I’m maintaining is overflowing with fake subscriptions. If we’ve spoken, you’re safe. If not, leave a comment or drop me a line.

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I started listening to How to Live or A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell. Montaigne has been on my reading list forever and this is a great introduction. Bakewell starts each chapter with an answer to the main theme of Montaigne’s essays, how to live.

Photo Credit: Clay Banks

Chapter One: How to live? Don’t worry about death. It’s ironic that I would encounter this tidbit advice a week after writing last week about Harold’s death. Bakewell makes the case that Montaigne’s near death experience when he is thrown from a horse, knocked unconscious and coughing blood gives him the courage to establish a new philosophy different than the classics. The classics urge that philosophy is the preparation for death. Montaigne while recovering, drifts in the dream world where he believes he eases into death and prefers that.

Chapter Two: How to live? Pay attention. Montaigne establishes a new type of writing where he flits from one topic to another, in what would later be described as a stream of consciousness. He paid close attention to what he did and what he thought, that it was not unusual for different versions of Montaigne (younger or older) to appear within the same essay. This accounting of his thoughts is a practical version of inscription at the temple of Apollo at Delphi; Know thyself. Bakewell declares Montaigne to have achieved some level of awareness that Buddhist masters take lifetimes to obtain.

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I was reading The School of Life by Alain de Botton again. There’s a section about Rorschach Inkblot tests. The idea behind the test is to show a random inkblot to a someone and ask them what they see. Though the image is abstract, sometimes people will “see” an image which can explain a foundational experience for the person.

A test with similar intent is the Thematic Apperception Test (Scribd link) developed by Henry Murray and Christina Morgan shows images with deliberately ambiguous scenarios. Upon seeing these images, people will use their experience to draw conclusions about what is happening. I wonder what interpretation, Mr. self-awareness, Michel de Montaigne, would come up with.

Henry Murray also conducted some harmful psychological experiments on his Harvard students, one of which was Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. Make what you will of that information.

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Word of the Week: Endogenous

Find of the Week

Imagine hearing this sound in the middle of a dark Eucalyptus forest down under.

Fred Schultz @FredSchultz35

I had no idea that Kolas sounded like that. 😳🐨

Skokie, IL The winter of 2022

If you’re a Nest user - read to the end. If not, please ignore my complaints about the weather.

We’ve been burning through two face cords of firewood. This week’s weather reminds why I hate the deep of Chicago’s winter. We’ve had enough snow to shovel…twice. And the temperature remains in high single digits and we do not talk about the windchill.

The HVAC technician came to our place to figure out why our furnace could not keep our home warmer than 70 degrees. The problem was our Nest thermostat. After working nicely for several years, the battery is no longer working well, so our furnace behaves in an unpredictable way.

I fixed the problem.

I wired the Google Nest Power Connector (GNPC) to our furnace and the problem is fixed. If you have a Nest and your furnace is acting wonky. Your Nest thermostat might be the issue. The GNPC gets power to the Nest so that doesn’t need to charge the battery - best $25 I’ve spent in a long time.

Got some pithy how to live tips? Do you have a solid emotional inheritance or did a college professor really screw you up? General derision for my writing?

Think someone might else might like this…

That’s all I got…till next week.

-George