Thanks to Masterpiece on PBS, I recently discovered and read an incredibly good novel. Written and set approximately 150 years ago, in the late 1800s, the book is about—as far as I can tell—Amazon.com.

But let me explain. I was browsing through my local brick-and-mortar book store, which fortunately still existed at that moment in time, for that was where I happened across a book with a cover featuring TV actors in period costume. As I am not a big watcher of TV or movies, such covers usually turn me off. However, this particular cover featured a famous name: Émile Zola.

Having never read anything by the great French writer Émile Zola, I impulsively snatched up the book, deciding, on the spot, that my acquaintance with this author could be delayed no longer. Truly, I couldn’t help it! Call it feminine weakness, if you will. Or, call it a helpless surrender to consumerist culture. In any case, there I was, inserting my credit card into a chip reader, in exchange for an exquisitely pretty paperback labelled The Paradise—but which I soon discovered was originally titled The Ladies’ Paradise.

In the novel, The Ladies’ Paradise is the name of a large store in Paris that is crushing the small businesses nearby. Women are nearly powerless before it: they roam its galleries in awe of the delicate merchandise, and they flock from within and outside of the city to purchase the fabrics and ready-made clothes on offer. Meanwhile, the mom-and-pop competition try to hold their own by adhering to old-fashioned values such as artistry, intimate knowledge of a particular trade and its goods, family-oriented service, and high prices that indicate value. Zola describes one small-business-owning family in this way:

“The Baudus were not a bad sort of people. But they complained of never having had any luck.”

That is—unluckily for them, most customers preferred cheaper prices, more spectacle and grandeur, and a wide and ever-increasing selection of merchandise.

“Had anyone ever seen such a thing?” Monsieur Baudu rants at one point. “A draper’s shop selling everything! Why not call it a bazaar at once? And the employees! . . . treating goods and customers like so many parcels . . . No affection, no manners, no taste!”

Sound familiar? Twenty-five years ago, had anyone ever heard of a bookstore selling everything?! Treating customers like so many shipping boxes?! No taste!!

Thus the wisdom of Zola was revealed to me; a 150-year-old story that resonates so well today must be describing some sort of universal theme. And best of all: the author does not take sides. He does not present big business owners as any better or worse than small business owners. He presents them all as humans making choices—and the moral is that those who obstinately refuse to adapt to changing times, and those who fail to actively, persistently work toward positive innovation, will suffer for their inflexibility, no matter who they are.

How do you handle the choice between shopping big and global, versus small and local? How do your favorite small businesses stay in the black—have they made innovations, or developed specialties, that enable them to compete successfully in a difficult marketplace? Have your favorite big businesses made innovations, or developed specialties, as well?

What do Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics and David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College (known as the “This Is Water” speech) have in common?

Both of these famous philosophies, according to Matthew B. Crawford in his book The World Beyond Your Head, are faulty—and for the same reason.

It’s a bold claim. Crawford attempts to topple two towering figures of Western culture and thought in one fell swoop! So let’s back up a sec and analyze what Kant’s and Wallace’s philosophies, in these instances, are. Then we can delve into why Crawford thinks they are wrong.

Immanuel Kant’s Metaphysics of Freedom

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was a German philosopher famous for a philosophy called the categorical imperative. He states that morality exists beyond the realm of the everyday world, and can be derived through reason alone. The moral law, he says, is categorically (“unconditionally”) imperative (“crucial and essential”).

Crawford points out that Kant held a mind thinking rationally, in an ideal state, in far higher esteem than a mind grappling with the way things are in the messy, real world:

“Kant builds a high wall between the empirical world and the purely intellectual, where we discover a priori moral laws. Reasons to act must come only from the latter if we are to be free, and the will is to remain pure, ‘unconditioned’ by anything external to it. . . . To be rational is, for Kant, precisely not to be situated in the world.”

David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” Commencement Speech

As those who know me well know, I am a huge fan of David Foster Wallace (1962–2008). Infinite Jest was well worth the struggle to read. I have also enjoyed and marveled at the brilliance of many of his other works, fictional and nonfictional. However, I was distinctly unimpressed by his work—for the only time ever—when encountering, ten years ago, the commencement speech he delivered on May 21, 2005: and for the same reasons Crawford cites.

Even ten years later—and I remember it very well: it was exactly ten years ago, give or take a few months, when my boss (at the time) printed the speech and gave it to me, as a benefactory gesture, an offering* of moral guidance from mentor to mentee, and which I duly read, but did not duly (oops) compliment, nor, however, criticize, because, after all, who criticizes David Foster Wallace?!!

But I seem to have gotten off track. As I was saying, even ten years later, I distinctly remember the bit in the speech about the annoyance of grocery shopping. Wallace opines that if you are engaged in one of the many frustrating activities of modern life—such as grocery shopping, after a long day at work, in an ugly and crowded supermarket, when all you want to do is go home and rest, but everything is annoying and taking too long, etc.—that you should remember that you can always control what you are thinking.

Here’s what Crawford has to say about this:

“Wallace’s core suggestion in the speech is that ‘you get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.’ . . . His solution is thus emblematic of the problem we are addressing in this book: we have an uncertain grasp of the world as something with a reality of its own.”

In other words, Wallace, in this speech, held a mind thinking rationally, in an ideal state, in far higher esteem than a mind grappling with the way things are in the messy, real world.

Matthew B. Crawford’s Praise of the World Beyond Your Head

I believe in the power of the mind, thinking rationally; but I also concur with Crawford that thinking in an idealized bubble is not enough. There’s a real world to contend with out there! If the deep, rational thinkers aren’t up for working to make a difference . . . whom does that leave?

Crawford titled his book The World Beyond Your Head. His thesis is that we should work to apply our minds to real things, in the real world, despite the many powers that be and cultural conceptions guiding us in less grounded—and more illusory—directions. This quote of his is buried in a footnote, but it’s one of my favorites in the whole book:

“Wisdom is impossible without biography.”

The mind is not an empty shopping cart, hovering in an imaginary space. It has a history. It has been filled and emptied a bit, filled a lot more and emptied a bit more. It has traveled the aisles again and again and again. It has been knocked around quite a lot, but it keeps going. It keeps moving. It keeps engaging. And the more it moves and engages, the fuller it becomes.

With what real-world activities will you fill your cart today, this week, next year?

*I thought I'd throw a footnote in here, just for good measure. (RIP DFW.)

When I think of wisdom,* I think of Henry David Thoreau and his 1854 book Walden; or, Life in the Woods. In Walden, Thoreau urges the reader, through both theoretical arguments and reflections on the two years he lived alone in the woods near Walden Pond, to simplify life and focus on what is really important—like health and wellness, quiet time alone, quiet conversations with friends, and an appreciation of nature and art.

What does this have to do with cooking? Well, everything. Some people are passionate about cooking and spend endless joyful hours reading recipes, shopping for ingredients, and working in the kitchen. If that’s you, that’s fabulous; and when can I come over? If that’s not you, or if you’re busy with other commitments that take precedence, one of life’s dilemmas is how to simplify the task of preparing meals while neglecting neither health and wellness, nor one’s appreciation of delicious food.

Of course, there is no lack of recipes intended to assist the reluctant or busy cook, the cook who is concerned about health, the cook who wishes to prepare delicious food, and even the cook who embodies all of these types. But while recipes are wonderful and useful, the reluctant or busy, health-conscious, epicurean cook may find that they often have drawbacks in these areas:

• Simplicity. Scanning through recipes and selecting one; buying ingredients, sometimes hunting through multiple aisles or stores to find them; rounding up utensils and appliances, sometimes not owning an item and having to buy it, borrow it, or figure out how to do without; and following elaborate instructions—all of this takes time and energy. If you don’t enjoy these tasks, or if you enjoy them but are too busy to do them often, it is helpful to simplify the process by cutting out unnecessary steps.
• Random leftover ingredients. Almost inevitably, you will have random leftover ingredients after following a recipe. This obligates you to find a new recipe that incorporates these random items. The new recipe, though, often leaves you with a different set of random leftover ingredients—and sometimes you still haven’t used up the items from the first recipe. So you fall into a vicious circle of always having to hunt for new recipes to use up random ingredients—or, alternatively, let these ingredients go to waste.
• Local food sourcing. If you have a garden or buy locally grown veggies, it can be tricky to find recipes that use the particular ingredients you happen to have on hand. Also, many recipes are impossible to make with locally grown vegetables, either because a particular veggie doesn’t grow in your area, or because the recipe uses two or more veggies that are harvested at different times of year—i.e., fresh asparagus (early spring) and fresh tomatoes (mid to late summer).
• Healthy eating and food requirements and preferences. Finding the perfect recipe, one that has just the ingredients you wish it to have, and not any ingredients you don’t wish it to have, can be frustrating and time consuming.

It can be exciting, instructive, and fun to follow a recipe. To assist with the times when it is not, I have written what I like to call my “Recipe to End All Recipes.” (See part 2 of this two-part series.) The “Recipe to End &c.” is flexible enough to work with whatever ingredients you happen to have on hand, and it results in meals that are simple, tasty, healthy—and dare I say wise?

*In case I have not made it sufficiently clear up until now, I would like to express that this blog is about seeking wisdom through books and elsewhere. For more information, visit my new About page.

The inquisitive one was running on a forest path.

The path took a sharp turn. So the inquisitive one also took a sharp turn.

And then suddenly, the inquisitive one encountered, standing directly in the path, a dog dressed like Yoda! A blanket, with pink and gray plaid stripes, had been wrapped exquisitely around the dog, who seemed to be sitting up inside the blanket. The dog was peering out from the blanket with an expression of wisdom, quiet confidence, and acceptance.

Frightened, the inquisitive one backed away, slowly turned, and ran very quickly all the way back to the trailhead.

It was then that the inquisitive one recalled seeing something, upon turning in the opposite direction from the dog, before beginning to run back. Something had been crouching in the brush . . . something with a camera. . . .

The next day, feeling overwhelmingly curious, the inquisitive one ran that way again. But there was no trace of who and what had been there the day before.

Yep, it’s hard to avoid getting caught up in the cultural biases of one’s own time. However, there is a way out of this trap—as Albert Einstein knew.

Adam Becker, in his book What Is Real?, explores how historical events and philosophical ideas affected theories of quantum physics over the decades. He reveals that just because nearly everyone believes in a theory does not mean it is true. Some theories stick around because of historical accidents, charismatic leaders, or philosophical trends.

Becker shows how physicists of the twentieth century tended to jump on the bandwagon instead of learning about and engaging with a variety of ideas; and he notes that this issue is still relevant today. He ends the book by endorsing Einstein’s antidote to the bandwagon trap. In 1944, Einstein wrote:

“So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.”

Amen, Albert.