The Slow Grind & the Delight of Philosophical Digressions
Part 1: The Pre-Socratics
This week, like so many others, was a lesson in patience. The novel inches forward, the painting resists completion, and I am forced once again to confront the uncomfortable truth: creation takes longer than I want it to. Effort, energy, inspiration—these things cannot be summoned on command, no matter how much I wish otherwise.
But in the gaps between frustration, I found an unexpected source of joy: Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy.
This surprised me. My memories of Russell were tied to the dry, often absurd world of analytical philosophy—those interminable lectures where we dissected nonsensical sentences as if language were a mathematical proof waiting to be solved. (Wittgenstein, at least, eventually realized that words are not equations, but moves in a game.)
Yet here, Russell is something else entirely: witty, erudite, and deeply human. His History is vast, yes, but it’s also alive with anecdotes, sly judgments, and a profound grasp of not just ideas, but the people who carried them.
Take the Pre-Socratics, those early thinkers who stared at the world and tried to wrench meaning from it with nothing but observation and sheer audacity:
- Heraclitus, the misanthrope who declared that everything is fire and flux, that no man steps in the same river twice. (A philosopher after my own heart—grumpy, poetic, and convinced of universal impermanence.)
- Pythagoras, the mystic mathematician who believed numbers were the essence of reality (though for him, "number" meant something closer to sacred geometry than our dry digits).
- Parmenides, who built metaphysics out of pure logic, insisting that change was an illusion.
- Empedocles, the showman-scientist—part politician, part cult leader—who proved the existence of air with an upside-down bucket.
- Thales, the first of the Greek Philosophers (that we know of), who used Egyptian mathematics to calculate the distance of ships from shore and theorized that the fundamental essence of everything is water.
I’m still early in the book but I can’t help but wish my old philosophy courses had been like this—less logic-chopping, more storytelling. Less sterile analysis, more fire, water, and the stubborn human urge to make sense of things.
Perhaps that’s the lesson this week: progress is slow, but the detours are where the magic happens. Maybe the real work isn’t the novel or the painting at all, but the act of showing up, day after day, to the chaos of creation. The Pre-Socratics didn’t know the answers either; they just kept staring into the fire, the water, the void, and dared to say, “I think it’s like this…” A humbling thought.
(Now, back to the novel. Or the painting. Or the next chapter on Socrates. We’ll see which one wins.)
P.S. — I found out that much of the research for the book was carried out by Russell’s (third or fourth?) wife, Patricia (Spencer), and that Russell won a Nobel Prize for Literature after its publication in 1946.