Missives from Samsara

I’ve written about William Tecumseh Sherman before. However, I inspired to share a little more about him as I am partway through Robert L. O’Connell’s wonderful, and relatively short, biography of the American warrior.

Here are 5 facts interesting facts about Mr. Sherman.

1. His middle name comes from the great Shawnee warrior Tecumseh who fought against the Americans in the War of 1812. This was something I was familiar with because Tecumseh comes up in my APUSH curriculum.

2. Sherman had 10 other siblings and his father died when he was young, so he and several of his siblings were orphaned out to family and friends. In Sherman’s case, he was adopted by a wealthy, good friend of his father’s named Thomas Ewing. The Ewings also took in William’s brother John, who would go on to become a congressman and the author of the famous (if ineffectual) Sherman Anti-trust Act of 1890.

3. Sherman was one of the first government officials to verify the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in what is now Sacramento. He had been stationed a bit south along the California coast during the Mexican War (he was bummed not to be near where the fighting was). Nevertheless, he visited Sutter, saw what had been discovered, and mailed gold dust with confirmation to Washington, helping to start the California Gold Rush.

4. Sherman married his foster sister, a woman named Ellen Ewing. They weren’t blood siblings, but to the modern eye it still seems a bit off. And it was a bit off then, too. But they got married anyway in 1850.

5. Because his foster dad/father-in-law was a very well connected politician from Ohio, many powerful politicians from that era attended their wedding in Washington DC. Their wedding guests included the current president, Zachary Taylor (a military man, like Sherman), members of the cabinet, and congressional giants Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. It was definitely a Whig wedding.

William Tecumseh Sherman was clearly an interesting dude.

And yes, the Sherman tank was named after him.

Reading Louis Menand’s The Free World I came across the section on artist Jackson Pollock. I had heard of Pollock and knew he was most famous for his unique ‘drip’ style paintings. What caught my attention about him was how his life ended. Like many, many incredibly talented artists, Pollock was an alcoholic. According to Menand, he had essentially stopped making art in 1954, but kept boozing. He also suffered from depression. On a summer night in 1956, after drinking, he crashed his car with two female passengers. One of the women, along with Polllock, died in the crash. He was just 44 years old.

What sticks in my mind is the connection between his drinking and his life being cut short. As I said, he had quit making art, but who knows if he had lived longer if he wouldn’t have cleaned up and got back down to the business of being creative and blowing people’s minds (the drip art definitely blew people away in the early 1950s!). He also killed another person, a recklessness that I pin on his drinking. What a fucking waste.

Some quick research reveals that he is one of many, many talented artists and thinkers that died in similar circumstances. For instance, others that died in car crashes include Albert Camus and James Dean. Alcohol and/or drugs doomed Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Bonham, and Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

The beauty of reading a few books at the same time is that it provides an opportunity for a bit of “intellectual cross-pollination.” On one hand, I’m working through Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, which paints an extremely chilling portrait of Vladimir Lenin. I knew he was no angel, but I honestly didn’t know that much about him. On the other hand, I’m navigating the mid-century Parisian scenes of Louis Menand’s The Free World, focusing on writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. At first glance, they seem like an odd pair for a blog post, but for shits and giggles, and because I’ve done a few posts like this before, I figured I’d briefly compare these two 20th century giants with each other since they have both been renting space in my head of late.

Both men were intellectuals who felt a deep “moral rot” in the bourgeois systems they inhabited and were sort of ‘insider-outsiders.’ They shared a totalizing “bullet over ballot” mentality, believing that meaningful change required a violent break from the past rather than incremental reform. Whether it was Lenin’s Dialectical Materialism or Sartre’s later attempts to marry Marxism with Existentialism, they both sought a “synthesis of ideas” to explain the entire human experience.

However, when it comes to the “individual,” they were diametrically opposed. To Lenin, a person was a tool, a simple cog in the “Iron Discipline” of the party machine. He was, according to Johnson, ruthlessly quick to ‘put up against the wall’ those who were not willing to go along with his revolution. To Sartre, the individual is the ultimate source of meaning. Because he argued there is no pre-designed “human nature,” we are thus entirely responsible for creating our own truth through authentic, subjective choices. To him, hiding behind social roles or party lines (or dogmas) was a form of “bad faith”—an attempt to escape the terrifying reality that we, and we alone, are the masters of our own destiny. Indeed, for Sartre the ‘freedom’ we are born with is not a lighthearted gift, but a heavy burden, because there is no external moral authority or biological blueprint to blame for our failures, we alone are the masters of our destiny. Indeed, this existentialist idea is very Buddhist in my mind.

Ultimately, I find myself repulsed by Lenin the more I learn about him, especially his cruelty and his dogmatism. Sartre, despite being someone who apparently didn’t really take care of his body or personal hygiene (what kind of choice was that?), was accurate in his emphasis on authenticity and taking responsibility for our choices.

I love reading biographies. A sub-genre of biography that I like are those written about writers. One of the books I am reading now is a biography about the thriller writer John le Carré. Have I read any of le Carré’s books yet? No, not yet. Nevertheless, the life of a successful writer is endlessly fascinating to me.

Another book I just started (that I am really enjoying) is Louis Menand’s Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. In it, Menand has a long section about the writer George Orwell. Like most Gen Xers, I read Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm in middle school and/or high school. However, I didn’t know much about him. What struck me right away are some of the similarities between le Carré and Orwell.

Here are a few:

• Both were British writers.

• Both wrote with pen names. le Carré’s real name was David Cornwell. Orwell’s given name was Eric Blair.

• Orwell attended Eton College (which isn’t actually a college) in his youth and le Carré taught there.

• Both were anti-Stalinist. Orwell was famously a leftist, but was never a fan of Stalin, which helped him to stand against many of his fellow leftists in the early years of the Cold War. le Carré actually worked for a time for the British secret service in the Cold War (experiences which helped lead him to become a writer of spy novels).

• Both writers were deeply skeptical of concentrated power. Whether it was Orwell’s critique of totalitarianism in 1984 or le Carré’s critique of the “Circus” and the cynicism of Western bureaucracy, both viewed big institutions as inherently dehumanizing.

• Both lived lives characterized by a sense of not quite belonging. Orwell was an highly educated man who spent years living among the “down and out” ; le Carré was a spy who felt like an outsider within his own service due to his father’s criminal background.

• Finally, both authors were fiercely independent thinkers who refused to follow a party line. Orwell was a socialist who critiqued the Left; le Carré was a patriot who remained one of the most vocal critics of British and American foreign policy (particularly the Iraq War).

I first encountered Samuel Taylor Coleridge the way many fellow Gen Xers did, through a speaker cabinet. Iron Maiden’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, from their amazing 1984 album Powerslave, is a thirteen-minute epic based on Coleridge’s poem of the same name. It’s definitely a lot of song. The poem it draws from is a lot of poem; over six hundred lines of albatrosses, cursed sailors, and supernatural dread. Indeed, I remember making my Dad listen to it with me, thinking he’d be more likely to enjoy it since it was based on a Coleridge poem. At the time, I was more focused on Steve Harris’s bass lines than on British Romantic poetry, but Coleridge’s name lodged somewhere in the back of my brain.

He’s come back around to me recently via Paul Johnson’s The Birth of the Modern, which I continue to happily work through. Johnson covers in great detail the market for opium in Britain in the first decades of the 19th century (see the quote below). Never one to pull punches I’m discovering, Johnson also sketches a rather unflattering portrait of Coleridge. Indeed, his opium addiction is front and center. Apparently Coleridge had developed a serious dependency on laudanum, which in those days was widely available as a tincture. Ostensibly Coleridge used the drug for pain relief, but the habit consumed him. Johnson paints a picture of a man of staggering intellectual gifts who was nonetheless chronically unable to finish what he started. The unfinished poem Kubla Khan is perhaps the most famous example. It is a fragment of fifty-four lines that Coleridge claimed to have composed in an opium-induced dream, only to be interrupted by “a person from Porlock” before he could complete it.

What strikes me about Coleridge is the gap between his potential and his output. By most accounts, he was one of the most brilliant minds of his era — a gifted poet, philosopher, and literary critic. His conversations were legendary. His follow-through, considerably less so. The opium didn’t help. Neither, apparently, did the chaos of his personal life.

History is full of people undone by the distance between what they could have been and what they managed to pull off. F. Scott Fitzgerald, filmmaker Orson Welles, and original Pink Floyd frontman Syd Barret also come to mind in this regard. Coleridge is a particularly affecting case. Water, water everywhere — and yet.

Ryan Holiday is one of my favorite writers. I can’t recommend his books enough. Here are some great quotes from a few of his books.

The latest book I have started reading is a book called The Deficit Myth by economist Stephanie Kelton. The book argues in favor of what is called the Modern Monetary Theory. I was vaguely aware of the theory and decided to read the book so I could understand it better. Right off the back I thought about Ray Dalio’s ideas, as expressed in his books about the debt cycle, which I’ve read and enjoyed.

Now, I’ve been playing around with Gemini Pro lately, which gives me access to their latest AI model Gemini 3. So I decided to ask Gemini to explain what Kelton and Dalio might say to each other about the national debt. The results were interesting so I thought I’d share them here. As you’ll see, I asked a few follow up questions. I absolutely love that I can share the thread with others like I am doing here.

To read the thread, go here.