Monthly Archives: January 2025

By Michael F. Duggan

I was reading the news this week and thought to myself: with what character from a dystopian novel or film do I most identify? For me it’s Solomon Roth, the Edward G. Robinson character, from the 1973 movie, Soylent Green.

When I first saw the film (now dated, with some epic overacting by Charlton Heston) as a young person, it struck me as plausibly prophetic: an overcrowded, overheating world quite literarily devouring itself, with a small, insular, elite at the top. It is set in 2022. Prophecy indeed.

But then there is Sol Roth, the old guy (65) in a black beret, who remembers what was good about the old days, before everything went wrong. The younger Charleston Heston character rolls his eyes at him and his old-school gentility and what he suspects is the older man’s sentimentality and nostalgia. That is, until he (Sol) checks out via a spectacular, customized, multimedia show (at the all-too sanitized and accommodating Soylent factory) amid scenes of natural beauty set to “light classical” music (“guaranteed” to satisfy and to last 20 minutes). It is then that the younger man–the man of new age–realizes what has been lost, as he learns that “Soylent Green is people!”

According to the film, Roth is born in 1957, making him about six years older than me, and although I have no plans to visit the Soylent Green factory any time soon, our respective ages are in the same ballpark.

The scene in which Sol dies is especially poignant because this was Robinson’s final role. He died 84 days after shooting wrapped.

By Michael F. Duggan

One hundred thirty six years ago last week (January 3, 1889), the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, collapsed in a street in Turin. He had been acting in an increasingly erratic manner for a few weeks. The most commonly told version of the story is that, in a scene reminiscent of one in Crime and Punishment, Nietzsche bolted across the Piazza Carlo Alberto, and then, in tears, threw his arms around the neck of a horse that was being beaten by its master. If true, his last sane (or first insane) act, was one of compassion.

He was taken home in a state of unconsciousness, and when he awoke, he was never the same, other than in a few fleeting moments of lucidity and memory. For a number of days he was delusional and manic, singing, dancing, and loudly playing the piano in the house of his landlord. Leading up to his collapse, he he had written a series of letters (including ones to Cosima Wagner and Otto von Bismarck as well as to a number of friends), famously signing them “Dionysus” and “The Crucified.”

Franz Overbeck, a friend who had received one of the letters, took him (and likely saved him from legal trouble) to a sanatorium in Basel. His breakdown was diagnosed as “paralysis progressiva.” Today it would probably be called a psychotic breakdown. He was moved from Basel to a facility in Jena, closer to his mother and sister. His condition reached an intensified state of incoherence and hallucinations before, as Julian Young notes, lapsing into “catatonic withdrawal degenerating, [and] eventually, into a vegetative state.”

As Nietzsche biographer, R.J. Hollingdale observes:

“He took eleven years to die, and in that time he became a figure of legend: living, yet dead, existing in a world beyond human reach, he excited to a dangerous degree the myth-making powers of a nation increasingly addicted to fantasy and irrationalism. The Nietzsche for whom the Nazis built a museum at Weimar was, in all strictness, a madman: the Nietzsche of the last eleven years, transformed from a rational philosopher and writer of genius into a man without qualities upon whom any characteristics might be put.”

Over the course of 1888—the year leading up to his collapse–he had written five lucid, but increasingly excited (Dionysian) books. The man who had begun his career writing as a rational (Apollonian) and fairly dry academic, had become a drunken poet.

At the same time, he was working on what he characterized as his master work, The Will to Power (faithful selections of which were published in English as Writings from the Late Notebooks, 1885-1888 in 2003). Unfortunately Therese Elisabeth Alexandra Förster-Nietzsche, his sister and a vulgar proto-fascist, got hold of these, and after one of the most infamous hatchet jobs in literary history published them in unrecognizable form, grotesquely misrepresenting her stricken brother’s ideas. And so the advocate of aristocratic individualism became a patron saint of the Nazis (even though he hated German nationalism, mass movements, grandstanding thugs, and had called antisemitism “scabies of the heart”).

But even with the historical record largely corrected over the past 80 years, we have to be careful about Nietzsche. He is as dangerous as he is interesting. He was a sick man for most of his life, and at the end, he was mentally ill before becoming vegetative. Still his ideas should be read and evaluated on their merits rather than psychologized on the basis of his descent into madness..

To introduce him even into informed conversation is to risk a fight or outright dismissal by people who have only glimpsed his oeuvre or have internalized the lingering rumors (there is a New Yorker cartoon from the 1950s in which a man tells a bartender “At my first mention of Nietzsche, stop serving me”). But the fascination about him has also persisted. He is like a figure out of romantic fiction: one of the greatest minds of the 19th century and one of the most strikingly original thinkers of all time who was also the living embodiment of the mad philosopher (a title he shares with Diogenes of Sinope). For some people he is the embodiment of the insane genius, and if often blamed as a font of the chaos of the 20th century (Bertrand Russell lumps Nietzsche among the “angry men” of the 1890s, along with Ibsen and Strindberg, even though he spend the entire decade in a vegetative state).

Nietzsche fails as the basis for a political or programmatic thinker. As Thomas Hardy writes (with a fair amount of reduction), Nietzsche “insanely regarded life as a thing improvable by force to immaculate gloriousness, when all the time life’s inseparable conditions allow only for clumsy opportunities for amelioration by plodding compromises and contrivances.” Okay, but that is only a part of him, and there is more to life than “plodding compromises and contrivances,” malicious irony, and “the intrinsic crookedness of things.”

Like many idealists who take their ideas to logical absurdity, Nietzsche has something to offer in terms of prescribing a basis for living in a world without intrinsic values or meaning. A liberal-minded reading of his ideas is that we should seek to be our best selves–actualize our intrinsic qualities as best as possible in a fleeting life–and live as nobly as possible amidst life’s imperfections. Even if the eternal recurrence of the universe is not literally true, the past still exists in a certain, perhaps literal, sense, and therefore, insofar as it is in our power to do so, we should strive to make our lives monuments for eternity.

By Michael F. Duggan

Five years ago yesterday, the World Health Organization noticed a large pneumonia cluster in and around the Chinese city of Wuhan. The end, when it comes, may be a big event, like the crises of the environment or a nuclear war. Or it may begin as an obscure occurrence in places remote from us, a small thing mostly unnoticed.

By Michael F. Duggan

In late September 2021, I put in my 90-day notice at work. My father died late the next night. I was scheduled to retire on December 31, but tested positive for COVID on Christmas Eve, and I missed my last week of work. Retirement was starting off like a John Irving novel (or a bad ’70s cop show where the retiring veteran officer gets shot on his last day). My first run-in with COVID–essentially a minor head cold–lasted around 72 hours, and during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve ’21, I began walking every day.

Two friends who had retired before me, gave conflicting pieces of advice. The first said to take some time–a month, three months six months, a year–“to figure out who you are in retirement and then to go from there.” The other was: “Because you know what you want to do, just jump in with both feet and become the person you want to be. Life is too short.” I wanted write and to get in reasonable shape, to walk. Although the first bit to advice is suitable for many people, life is too short. I chose the second.

I usually (90-95% of the time) walk a route in Cabin John Park that is 2.7-3.0 miles (around 48-55 minutes, depending). I walk in all weather and actually prefer rain and frozen precipitation. It makes you feel like you’re doing something (I love the woods in all seasons, but it is at its most beautiful as an austere snowscape, when I can semi-plausibly carry an ice axe instead of a walking stick without alarming other walkers).

Droughts are the hardest to take–they’re like watching the world die in slow motion, and this fall we set a record for the longest period without rain in the area, 38 days. The resiliency of nature is striking.

In 2022 I walked 355 or 356 days (missing 9 or 10 days due to travel). Walked a perfect 365 in ’23. Same for 2024, as of today. If I am sick, or if family duties call, I may walk as little as .5 to 2.5 miles. Even on bad days–and there were some this year–I try to do the full route. It is good to force yourself to take an hour out of your day until it becomes routine. I walked daily through a second bout of COVID in December 2023 and bronchitis in March of this year. No matter how bad, a day can be improved by a short walk (it’s kind of like golf without the frustration and thrown clubs).

In my experience, walking is one of the few exercises, that stimulates thought, and has been endorsed by thinkers from the PreSocratics, to Aristotle, to Darwin, Nietzsche, John Kaag, and most blues musicians. If you carry a small pad and pencil, you can plan your whole week or write a short article on a single walk (and if you don’t write down a line or idea when you think of it, it won’t be there later, unless you keep repeating it in your head until you get back to the car). After walking, if there is nothing more pressing on my list, I go home for lunch and to write.

The biodiversity of Cabin John Regional Park is impressive, a veritable oasis in the ever-expanding human monocultural desert (a new beaver dam appeared on the creek over the past few weeks, the first in perhaps two years). I have counted around 60 species of birds (more, if I could distinguish between kinds of sparrows and hawks), around a dozen species of snakes, and I saw a magnificent marbled salamander in September ’22. There is a thriving population of box turtles (at least two subspecies) and apparently some (transient?) coyotes that I have only seen twice and are quite beautiful. Foxes and deer abound, including a few 6 and 8 point bucks. A short stretch of trail runs alongside I-270, where the sounds of the cars and truck are like the trumpeting of mammoths and mastodons.

There is a small valley on my route, a valley of ferns and moss with a steep face of mountain laurel and a vernal pool on the bottomland–an intermittent pond (or large puddle)–that is a stop-over point for a pair of wood ducks in the spring. The pool occupies a depression that was likely an old channel of the creek. In rainy seasons, it is shaped like an exclamation point. As it dries, it becomes a question mark and then a truncated number seven before disappearing completely.

I get bored or impatient when I run or walk on a treadmill or through my neighborhood (where I start involuntarily calculating the number of houses to the end), but never in nature, where the same path is never the same one twice (take that, Heraclitus). It is the ever evolving, endlessly interesting answer to the Myth of Sisyphus (or its modern analogs in Camus and the film “Groundhog Day”). You also come to be able to read the seasons by the month via natural signs, almost down to the week of the month (okay, maybe not in the dead of winter). I always notice the first ice on the creek in late fall and the first bloodroots and Indian pipes of spring.

As on the water, people are friendlier on trails. Most people will say hi, and you start recognizing the regulars and their dogs (and they recognize me with my Yeti coffee mug and blackthorn walking stick, a prop, really). In spite of the damage they do to the trail, mountain bikers are friendly and polite, more so than some of the street bicyclists I have come across. The best walks are where you don’t see anyone–on rainy Monday mornings, for instance.

The park is not without its pathos. On Christmas 2023, a fox was hit by a car at the trailhead on Tuckerman Lane. This summer I saw two spider-versus-wasp fights in which the wasp wins better than 99% of the time. There are events in nature that make a bar fight look like a debutante’s ball by comparison.

When I walk, I also pick up the discarded plastic I come across. It is shocking how much there is out there, even in relatively clean places like a regional park. The creek can be especially bad, and the fence along I-270 looks like a junkyard for polymers. I picked up at least one, and usually several pieces of plastic on the trail every day in 2024 (once, early in ’22, I filled two large garbage bags). It has become a kind of obsession with me.

More broadly, I am trying to affect a separate peace, a personal Hippocratic Oath with nature (to mix metaphors), to do no harm and to remediate wherever whenever possible. I am far from perfect–I drive a car and am more wasteful than I would like to be–but I can approximate stewardship in the woods.

I hope to continue this resolution for the New Year and beyond–for as long as I am able. It is one of the few I have been able to keep for an extended period. Happy New Year.