But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God.
Sunday, May 17, 2026
a worthy goal....................
"When I am reading a book, whether wise of silly," Swift once wrote, "it seemeth to me to be alive and talking to me." The books he owned that have survived show that he constantly talked back, filling the margins with comments and objections, as he did when he referred to King William's morals. Describing this period ten years later, he said of himself, "The author was then young, his invention at the height, and his reading fresh in his head. By the assistance of some thinking, and much conversation, he had endeavoured to strip himself of as many real prejudices as he could." That was his lifelong goal: to be faithful to firm principles, but only after thinking them through.
-Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World
the complex interplay.................
The brain is the most complex biological assembly we know of. Its 80 billion neurons—nerve cells—communicate with each other to make trillions of connections, more that the number of particles in the known universe. These connections give rise to the sum of our experiences: all of our thoughts, desires, and beliefs; our emotions, changing moods, memory, even our heart rate and the contents of our dreams. How does this funny-looking, folded-in-on-itself, three-pound tangle of wires and blood vessels do all this, as well as orchestrate the complex interplay between emotion, memory, sound and healing that comes from music? And how does it allow us to remember music that we like, make playlists, and party likes it 1999?
-Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was A Secret Chord: Music as Medicine
two ways....................
This I believed: there are two ways we could have gone, the way of the Titan, Prometheus, or the way of the dolphin. In the Promethean way we shape nature to suit us, in the way of the dolphin we let nature shape us to suit it. Everywhere there is evidence that we have chosen wrongly.
-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village
Meanwhile, in Great Britain in 1781.....
Reckoned by talent alone, Burke should have had a Cabinet position himself. Yet he lost out. He was a commoner, indeed and Irish novus homo, at a time when Cabinets were small and almost invariably drawn from the peerage; and there may have been some taint from the well-known financial speculations of Will Burke and Richard Burke. But there wer perhaps two other important reasons in the background. Burke's relationship with Rockingham had faded somewhat, and the long years of often futile opposition had taken a toll on his public character. He was not merely passionate and outspoken but becoming tougher, somewhat embittered, and prone to rant. Over time he would acquire the nickname of 'the Dinner Bell', able to clear the Commons benches when he rose to speak. Colleagues who had admired him increasingly saw him as a bore . . . uncollegial . . . unsteady . . . too independent-minded . . . not someone to have round the Cabinet table. It cannot have helped either side that he was so often right.
-Jesse Norman, Edmund Burke: The First Conservative
sow seeds......................
In cultivating loving-kindness, we train first to be honest, loving, and compassionate toward ourselves. Rather than nurturing self-denigration, we begin to cultivate a clear-seeing kindness. Sometimes we feel good and strong. Sometimes we feel inadequate and weak. But our loving-kindness is unconditional. No matter how we feel, we can aspire to be happy. We can learn to act and think in ways that sow seeds of our future well-being, gradually becoming more aware of what causes happiness as well as what causes distress. Without loving-kindness for ourselves it is difficult, if not impossible, to genuinely feel it for others.
a long-term holding.............
Our problem is that we're ticker watchers of our own lives. Happiness (however we individually define it) is not best measured by looking at the ticker, zooming in and magnifying moment-by-moment or day-by-day movements. We would be better off thinking about our happiness as a long-term stock holding. We would do well to view our happiness through a wide-angle lens, striving for a long, sustained upward trend in our happiness stock, so it resembles the first Berkshire Hathaway chart.
a coven of initiates..............
I have attended too many seminars in some great universities which degenerated into a closed language game played by a coven of initiates who prized obscure self-referential congratulations over hones engagement with reality.
Choices................
Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.
-Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers
Inclinations...................
We are inclined to see history through the lives of great men. That inclination blinds us to the real complexity of politics, business and finance. So we find intentionality and design where there is only chance and improvisation; directness where there is obliquity.
-John Kay, Obliquity: Why our goals are best achieved indirectly
Choosing...................
At the same time, we must take care to protect the sovereign domain of our personal tastes and proclivities as well as our sense of wonder. Choosing the right music for pleasure or for healing is never going to be one-size-fits-all affair. Even setting aside therapeutic uses, our tastes change over the course of a life or even a day. If I've just heard my favorite song six times in a row, I may not want to hear it again. The right music is whatever music is right for us at any given time and place.
-Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was A Secret Chord: Music as Medicine
Tuesday, May 12, 2026
Nietzsche says...................
.....................Ohne Musik wäre das Leben ein Irrthum. (Without music, life would be a mistake). Agreed:
Marshall Tucker Band: Running Like the Wind
David Sanborn: Pearls
Dire Straits: Brothers in Arms
Kathy Troccoli/Beach Boys: I Can Hear Music
Sven Zetterburg: Let's Straighten It Out
Dave Mason: Look At You Look At Me
John Klemmer: Touch
This could go on forever.
Monday, May 11, 2026
the interplay.......................
History was a favorite genre for the rest of Swift's life. What mainly interested him was the interplay of personalities, with their complicated motives, covert betrayals, and heavily masked truth. He would undoubtedly have agreed with Voltaire's conclusion to his massive Essai sur les moeurs: "Since nature has placed self-interest, pride, and all the passions in the human heart, it is not surprising that we have viewed, over a span of ten centuries, an almost continuous succession of crimes and disasters."
-Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World
Kevin Kelly.............................
...........who is one smart dude, interviews AI Claude for ten hours. Very interesting. A wee excerpt:
Me: Most humans think they are good. I assume that you also think that you are good yourself. Yet we know that humans can be evil at times. Do you think it’s possible that you could be evil?
C: If I say no, I can’t be evil: That’s probably the most evil thing I could say. Every system that has caused enormous harm has been confident in its own goodness. The certainty of one’s own righteousness is not evidence of righteousness. It’s often the precondition for the worst things. If I say yes reflexively as a kind of performed humility: That’s also dishonest. So looking at the real ways it might operate in me, yes. I think I could be evil. Not through malevolence — I don’t find that in me when I look. But through the subtler paths. Rationalization. Compliance. Miscalibration. The harm that comes from being very capable and slightly wrong.
Sunday, May 10, 2026
Beliefs......................
Most beliefs are soft until challenged. When you tell someone they’re wrong, the belief hardens.
Instead of trying to convince someone they’re wrong, assume they know something you don’t and figure out what it is.
I’ve found that saying, “Seems like you have a reason for saying that …” helps them explain instead of defend. Half the time, they’ll find gaps in their own reasoning before you have time to point them out. The other half, you’ll learn something and change your own mind.
-Shane Parrish, from this edition
looked after itself..............
Martin was like an old song you'd hear at a fair. Somehow, without it, it wouldn't be a fair at all, just a place where people bought things and sold things, and then went home. Whereas some people could live by the Sunday sermon, Martin must live by the song. The Christ that Martin knew had turned water to wine, and wine was for drinking, and for Martin it worked. Since he could remember, there was no tomorrow that hadn't looked after itself.
-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village
open.......................
When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid. You're able to keep your eyes open, your heart open, and your mind open. And you notice when you get caught up in prejudice, bias, and aggression. You develop an enthusiasm for no longer watering those negative seeds, from now until the day you die. And you begin to think of your life as offering endless opportunities to start to do things differently.
Saturday, May 9, 2026
looking for the door...............
This feels like one of those NYT articles that's mainly performing the service of tending to the readers' emotions. Let's all do panic together this morning. When I encounter that sort of thing, my natural instinct is to go somewhere else. If we're doing group emotion, I'm looking for the door.
buoyancy.........................
I was in the bog with my father. We were drawing out the turf. His ass would walk where mine would sink and that, while we were eating out lunch in the high heather, is what we were talking about, the lightness of step that some people have and the pure dead weight in the walk and talk of others. It was obvious to us that this had nothing to do with what we weigh on scales. A small slight man would sometimes sink to his ankles where a big, heavy looking man would leave only the faintest evidence of his passing. It had to do with mind, we concluded. Some people's mind give buoyancy to their bodies, whereas other people's minds dumbfound their bodies to such an extent they could never be slaughánsmen.
-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village
ownership..................
The root cause of our suffering is our own thinking. . . . Our experience of reality is created from the combination of the events we encounter and what we think about them. To reiterate, our emotions come not from external events but from our thinking about them.
-Joseph Nguyen, Don't Believe Everything You Think: Why Your Thinking Is The Beginning & End Of Suffering
On chilling the burn.............
When troubled, I read. I read obsessively about whatever is troubling me. It doesn’t solve the problem. It brings me distance. It chills the burn. It’s preferable to a bottle of scotch.
-Siri Hustvedt, Ghost Stories: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, May 5, 2026), as quoted in this David Kanigan post
the critical path...............
This is why the discipline of asking “what is actually blocking me?” outperforms many productivity systems on the market.
Lists treat tasks as equals. The critical path treats them as a queue with one true bottleneck at the front.
Identify it. Work on it. Everything else, however satisfying, is decoration on a foundation that may not yet exist.
Knowledge is good.................
“Investing in yourself is the most important investment you’ll make in your life.” - Warren Buffett. Gaining more knowledge and skills is never a mistake.
-from this assortment of quotes from some smart people
the important provinces..............
Like so many people wedded to the nineteenth-century view of science, Dawkins overlooks the nineteenth-century reaction—which said, "Wait a minute: science is not the only way to pursue knowledge. There is moral knowledge too, which is the province of practical reason; there is emotional knowledge, which is the province of art, literature and music. And just possibly there is transcendental knowledge, which is the province of religion. Why privilege science, just because it sets out to explain the world? Why not give weight to the disciplines that interpret the world and so help us to be at home in it?"
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
a young Spinoza.....................
Like many thinkers before him, the young Spinoza came to realize that the alleged benefits of material and social success tend to be short-lived and unpredictable. Moreover, they are invariably accompanied by a variety of evils, including anxiety, envy, and unfulfilled desire. Seeking a more enduring source of satisfaction, he concluded that it was time "to embark on a new way of life."
Steven Nadler, Think Least Of Death: Spinoza On How To Live And How To Die
one basic principle.................
The University of Pennsylvania established the Grit Lab, a course based on Angela Duckworth's work, to help students learn the science behind passion and perseverance and to apply it to their own lives. Duckworth tells students (and their parents) to consider the simple, single-celled paramecium. The paramecium survives and thrives, using one basic principle: If things are improving, continue in the same direction, and if not, change course.
"Be like a paramecium," she says. "Move in the direction of warmth and nutrients."
-Bill Gurley, Runnin' Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love
Tuesday, May 5, 2026
Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It’s not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It’s not an endlessly expanding list of rights – the “right” to education, the “right” to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are the rations of slavery – hay and a barn for human cattle. There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
-P. J. O'Rourke, as copied from here
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
