novels bring back the time when

we could be most exalted by the practice of perfecting ourselves. But in this world today, perfecting yourself is navel-gazing. Any kind of self-attention is attention away from a world that's coming apart. The impulse to do something about the state of the world seems to make one a candidate for sacrifice in belittlement. the self-perfecting somehow doesn't apply, although morally you think it would. there's a kind of grey annihilation of the self--which I guess could be ennobled by considering in the Buddhist context, but to agitate against inequity, destruction of resources, inhumanity to others, these seem just fatiguing and demolishing and degrading of the self, unless I suppose you learn the art of participating in them exuberantly, artfully. that may be the only successful adaptation to learn.

Bertrand Russel's enjoining to lead a life motivated by love and guided by knowledge, or something like that, would be the touchstone idea, which, if never lost sight of, might make for the life well-lived, and artfully...