How to Live

Recently, I have started to read How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell. For anyone interested, here are the 20 themes discussed in the book: 

Don't worry about death;
Pay attention;

Be born;
Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted;
Survive love and loss;
Use little tricks;
Question everything;
Keep a private room behind the shop;
Be convivial: live with others;
Wake from the sleep of habit;
Live temperately;
Guard your humanity;
Do something no one has done before;
See the world;
Do a good job, but not too good a job;
Philosophize only by accident;
Reflect on everything; regret nothing;
Give up control;
Be ordinary and imperfect;
Let life be its own answer.

Trust by Hernan Diaz

I just finished reading Trust, the 2022 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction by Hernan Diaz. The novel begins in New York City in 1927 and ends in 1938, chronicling the collective experience of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. The book explores themes such as class, power, and money, and how they can be used to control the truth, thereby controlling the narrative. Here is an excellent review of the book by The Atlantic.

Law and Manners By Lord Moulton

I came across Lord Moulton’s incredible essay titled “Law and Manners” while listening to the EconTalk podcast. In his essay, Moulton discusses unwritten rules, or the Obedience of the Unforceable, that fall between Positive Law and Free Choice. The central tenet of the essay is that Positive Law provides a necessary but not sufficient framework for regulating human manners. He, therefore, argues that manners are crucial in maintaining social stratum. Here is a direct quote from the essay that emphasizes this theme — 

“In order to explain my title I must ask you to follow me in examining the three great domains of human action. First comes the domain of positive law, where our actions are prescribed by laws which must be obeyed. Next comes the domain of free choice, which includes all those actions as to which we claim and enjoy complete freedom. But between these two there is a third large and important domain in which there rules neither positive law nor absolute freedom. In that domain there is no law which inexorably determines our course of action, and yet we feel that we are not free to choose as we would. The degree of this sense of a lack of complete freedom in this domain varies in every case. It grades from a consciousness of a duty nearly as strong as positive law to a feeling that the matter is all but a question of personal choice. Some might wish to parcel out this domain into separate countries, calling one, for instance, the domain of duty, another the domain of public spirit, another the domain of good form; but I prefer to look at it as all one domain, for it has one and the same characteristic throughout — it is the domain of Obedience to the Unenforceable. The obedience is the obedience of a man to that which he cannot be forced to obey. He is the enforcer of the law upon himself.”