A Curious Little Blog

When I was in high school, an older student informed me that the goal of a prep was not to be "cool," but "smooth."  I'm not sure what he meant by that (and I doubt he totally was either), but smoothness makes me think of sprezzatura.  Sprezzatura was a concept invented by Baldasare Castiglione in his "Book of the Courtier" to describe doing something in an apparently effortless way.  It wasn't important that it actually be effortless; it just needed to appear that way. Castiglione's book was the most famous of many from the 16th century that offered advice to would-be courtiers.  In an age of absolutist rulers, the quickest way to advance was to be impress the ruler in person.  This was very different in substance from the ideas of ataraxia and patience that ancient authors had espoused; it wasn't a general approach to life, but rather a specific way of getting ahead.  Nevertheless, it wasn't entirely new (of course); there had alway...

When I was young, I was the opposite of cool, and I had a correspondingly low opinion of the concept.  Sure, I liked Fonzie, but when I thought of people being cool, I thought of classmates putting on airs to get attention. Now I'm much older.  I'm still not cool, but I have a much better appreciation of the concept.  "Cool," it turns out, was not invented in 1957 (pace Miles Davis's album "The Birth of Cool" from that year), and not even in the modern era.  The original cool goes back to the ancient Greeks and the Stoics' concept of "apatheia," or equanimity.  They aimed to free themselves from their passions to attain this state of calm, and what is a cool person but one who remains calm and collected in the face of upsetting circumstances?  The concept was adapted and extended by Epicurus, who used the term "ataraxia," or tranquility -- freedom from stress and worry. Another philosophical school that promoted a...