A portable inner monastery of the muse

Twenty-two years ago I read Morris Berman’s The Twilight of American Culture and encountered one of the most personally resonant ideas that I’ve ever found in a work of cultural criticism: the “monastic option” and the “new monastic individual.” The idea was that we can each become a monk, cultivating a kind of portable inner monastery.

Berman argued that in a time of cultural decline, the most meaningful forms of resistance and preservation may need to remain private, small-scale, and largely outside the attention economy (though he didn’t actually use the latter term). “The more individual the activity is, and the more out of the public eye,” he wrote, “the more effective it is likely to be.” That struck me deeply when I first read it in 2004, and it has only grown more meaningful over time.

Some people are natural joiners and institution-builders. Others aren’t. Increasingly, I find myself drawn to the image of the solitary monk, someone who pursues a deeply and personally meaningful path of preservation and transmission, and who relates to others through affinity based on this inner orientation, instead of through external organizational structures. Organizations carry a built-in tendency to become inward-turned in their own way over time. They eventually and inevitably betray their founding principles by focusing on sheer self-perpetuation. Maybe it’s prudent to keep an ironic awareness of this fact, and to invest in our real ideals at the individual level, in the sanctity of our selves.

Berman wrote that we can each choose “a way of life that becomes its own ‘monastery.’” That phrase has stayed with me for years. It eventually became one of the guiding ideas in Writing at the Wellspring, where I describe the possibility of carrying “a portable inner monastery of the muse.”

I’ve published a new Living Dark post that reflects on all of this: Berman, the solitary monastic ideal, institutions and inward life, and the idea of preserving a living connection with reality during an age of noise and collapse. It’s titled “The Monastery of Your Life.”

Bradbury’s book people, Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, and piano music for Dracula

An update on recent activity at my newsletter that may be of interest to all my readers:

First, a few days ago I published a reflection on Eisenhower’s dire warning about the military-industrial complex and the way his words actually proved to be a prophecy about where America was headed. In this post, I suggest that in our present-day, real-world dystopian scenario, the “monastic option” that Morris Berman famously laid out in his book The Twilight of American Culture—that is, the choice to deliberately preserve and pass down to a future generation some form of knowledge or way of living that can serve as the seed of a future renaissance—seems a valid and even necessary life path to adopt. By way of illustrating the point, I refer in my post to one famous fictional example of this monastic option in action: the “book people” in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Second, just today I published a recording of my own personal piano setting of the famous opening theme from director Paul Morrisey’s Blood for Dracula, sometimes known as Andy Warhol’s Dracula, along with the story of why I love this music and how I came to create a piano version of it nearly 30 years after I first started trying:

Click on either image above to open the corresponding post.

Subscribe to my newsletter to receive all such posts and essays directly in your inbox.