Philosophers have taken to the pages of the New York Times in an effort to justify themselves; but Paul Shaffer’s comment (it’s this post’s headline) after Whitney Houston’s death does a better job of this than all of their efforts.
Shaffer’s comment has concision, modesty, and beauty; it acknowledges the existence of a philosophical (and aesthetic, and spiritual) tradition within which people have long thought and written about the almost-inexplicable disparities at war within us:
In me there are two souls, alas, and their
Division tears my life in two.
Faust’s famous complaint can be seen as the beginning of philosophical wisdom, whether we imagine that insight in terms of Platonic darks and lights or Freudian death- and life-drives … UD likes the way Shaffer says “some kind of sense,” because philosophy cautions against the possibility of making fully satisfactory sense out of this latest event in the history of human vitality/self-destruction. We all lead some variant of this energized and then at times totally-flopping-into-nothingness-and-defeat life; but when icons of vitalism, intensity, and creative energy (Houston, David Foster Wallace, Amy Winehouse, and, farther back, Lenny Bruce – our most powerful artists) run through those two currents of vivacity and void all their lives, right in front of us, and then ultimately (and early in the race) collapse, they rivet our attention to human bondage.
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Les UDs were finishing dinner last night at Indian Ocean restaurant on Connecticut Avenue, with their friends Steve and Di Elkin, when La Kid called Mr UD about Houston. She was walking back from a charity event at which she and her George Washington University a cappella group, The Sirens, had performed. As UD watched Mr UD listening to her, she felt that weird maternal helpless thing where you understand how your kid feels and it’s bad but you can’t do anything about it.