Surprising Things I learned in 2021
1. Emotional Intimacy can attenuate erotic desire: Esther Perel is a couple's therapist and the writer of the two best books on companionate love I've ever read – The State of Affairs and Mating in Captivity. Both books rehearse an argument that Perel makes, I think, convincingly–that emotional intimacy is often times inversely correlated with erotic desire for our partners. Desire is created by distance, and intimacy collapses that distance. Cultivating desire in a long term relationship is thus a delicate act of creating space where there is often none.
2. Spinoza's 365 year old excommunication is still in effect, something that Professor & Spinoza scholar Yitzhak Melamed recently discovered. Update: apparently the ban on building access was not authorized by whatever authority actually controls access to this historical synagogue, and was actually rescinded – jury’s out on the actual excommunication, however.
3. Russia was founded by a Viking. Okay, this is slightly reductive, but the predecessor state of Russia (and also the Ukraine & Belarus), Kievan Rus', was founded by a Varangian prince named Rurik. The Varangians were the Viking bodyguards of the Byzantine Emperors. Belarus and Russia derive their modern names from this state.
4. Sparta was ruled by two kings. Termed the Archagetai, these dual, hereditary monarchs ruled simultaneously and were co-equal in power. Believed to be descendants of Herakles, the archagetai performed civic, religious and military functions, most notably leading Spartan armies into battle. Their power was by no means absolute – Spartan kings were tried and even banished on rare occasions.
5. The most famous pyramids in Mexico weren’t built by the Aztecs, but by a far more ancient civilization. Teotihuacan was discovered by the Aztecs in the course of their wanderings in the 12th century. Upon happening on the site, they named it Teotihuacan, or ‘Birthplace of the Gods’, believing it to be a sacred city described in their mythology. One thesis argues that an ancestor civilization of the Aztecs built the city and its myriad pyramids, an ancestral memory that was passed on when that civilization dispersed from the site due to climate change or other factors. If true, there is a poignancy in the Aztecs happening upon one of the greatest achievements of their forebears.
The earliest parts of Teotihuacan were likely built around 600 B.C.E. At its zenith, it had a population of around 200k -- one of the largest cities in ancient history.
6. Though Kierkegaard is a father of existentalism, he emphasized human dependence. As Clare Carlisle points out in her phenomenal interview with Five Books, Kierkegaard is often seen as one of the architects of our modern, self-obsessed age, carving out as he did a novel conception of the individual in his philosophical work. For all of this emphasis on the individual, Kierkegaard mature philosophical thought emphasizes our profound dependence on something other than ourselves (i.e. God). As Carlisle remarks in the interview:
This also fits with existential authenticity, but what’s interesting to me is the degree to which people who talk about Kierkegaard from an existentialist point of view tend to excise the religious element because it’s inconvenient.
Yes, definitely. Many of the thinkers who identified themselves as existentialists in the twentieth century—Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir would be the most famous examples—were explicitly atheistic. Existentialism can have connotations of a humanist and individualistic quest to find or create meaning for yourself, and even creating yourself, making yourself into a certain kind of person through your choices and decisions; whereas, for Kierkegaard—and this is the central point in The Sickness Unto Death — human beings don’t make themselves, and we’re always dependent because we’re created. We’re in search of the ground of our being, which is not ourselves.
7. James Baldwin's favorite writer was Henry James. I personally found this surprising, but the more I learned, the more it helped deepen my understanding of one of my favorite writers. I write more about this here.