Persistent emotional turmoil can undermine our peace of mind, and it might be caused by an ongoing spiral that’s fueled by the short-term choices we make. Cultural and economic pressure can make those choices feel non-optional, but if we can protect ourselves early, we may be able to create enough value for others that our hygienic choices easily pay for themselves.
There are countless opportunities to thrive. But we might have to make hard choices to find them.
-Seth Godin, from this post
There is a tendency, as strong now as at any former time, to suppose that an oligarchy is admirable if it consists of 'good' men. The government of the Roman Empire was 'bad' until Constantine, and then it became 'good'. In the Book of Kings, there were those who did right in the sight of the Lord, and those who did evil. In English history as taught to children, there are 'good' kings and 'bad' kings. An oligarchy of Jews is 'bad', but one of Nazis is 'good'. The oligarchy of Tsarist aristocrats was 'bad', but that of the Communist Party is 'good'.
This attitude is unworthy of grown-up people. A child is 'good' when it obeys orders, and 'naughty' when it does not. When it grows up and becomes a political leader, it retains the ideas of the nursery, and defines the 'good' as those who obey its orders and the 'bad' as those who defy it. Consequently our own political party consists of 'good' men, and the opposite party consists of 'bad' men. 'Good' government is government by our group, 'bad' government that by the other group. The Montagues are 'good', the Capulets 'bad', or vice versa.
Such a point of view, if taken seriously, makes social life impossible.
-Bertrand Russell, The Taming of Power, circa 1938, from The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell
I had grown up in a world which, according to Bishop Ussher's reckonings, the one true God had made in 4004 B.C. It was a great drama, that world. A drama in five acts, the acts being Creation, Fall, Revelation, Redemption and Last Things. Having become incarnate in it, the God who created our world had left sacraments and commandments in it. By receiving the graces made available to us in these sacraments and by keeping these commandments, we could in the end win through to a life of glory. Alternatively, by rejecting the sacraments and breaking the commandments, we could be running the risk of damnation. It was in other words a drama that had for issue one or the other of two stupendous possibilities, eternal bliss in heaven or eternal perdition in hell.
That was the story I lived in. That was the story that sheltered me. And now I knew that it isn't only houses that shelter us. A great story can shelter us.
It was my calamity that I had fallen out of my story. I had fallen out of a world into a universe that seemed infinitely indifferent, even hostile to my purposes and yearnings.
And the killingly lonely thing was, I didn't know of anyone else to whom this had happened. As far as I could see, it was an utterly unique calamity. It only deepened my isolation whenever I attempted to talk to someone about it.
I felt like Job.
-John Moriarty, nostos: an autobiography
In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.
-Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
We did not live upon the same earth that they did and we flatter ourselves when we think we understand them.
She was not beautiful according to the standards of the magazines and moving pictures of the time, and she knew it. But by any standard she was a desirable woman, and she also knew that. She knew it from what she had seen in the eyes of certain men, to which from time to time she had felt something like an echo in herself.
That she was desirable was acceptable to her as a part of the liveliness and also the goodness of the world. It was a gift. But that she was desirable and knew it and accepted it unfitted her somewhat for her role as a minister's wife. It was not expected. She had not expected it herself until her own wits told her it was so. Part of her desirability was her look of knowing more that she was saying, and being amused by the difference. That, and the utter frankness of her presence. There was in her, even in old age, a declarative force of being that was unhesitating and without disguise.
-Wendell Berry, from his story, A Desirable Woman (1938-1941)
. . . lean more heavily on emotional intelligence rather than IQ. Temperament is more important than brainpower in the markets.
It is no longer sufficient for Johnny to understand the past. It is not even enough for him to understand the present, for the here-and-now environment will soon vanish. Johnny must learn to anticipate the directions and rate of change. He must, to put it technically, learn to make repeated, probabilistic, increasing long-range assumptions about the future. And so must Johnny's teachers.
-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1976)
When any statistic can be recruited to support your preferred theory, you are suffering from confirmation bias. Scientists like to boast that they strive to prove themselves wrong, that following the philosopher Karl Popper they know falsification is the essence of science. Nonsense. Like prosecutors determined to find a suspect guilty, they usually seek out evidence that bolsters, rather than challenges, their pet ideas. In this they are only human.
As the philosopher Francis Bacon noted in 1620: “And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happen much oftener, neglect and pass them by."
-Matt Ridley, from this substack
I think Christianity has often forgotten that it is a dream, to its own peril. When threaded to political power it often engenders the will rather than the wonder, the law almost entirely over the spirit. Christianity is a dream in which the very best of us is encouraged to emerge. A dream that challenges and inspires us. A dream in which God speaks directly to us.
-Martin Shaw, Liturgies of the Wild
Skye and Henry stood on a corner of Union Square on a fading San Francisco afternoon in early June, the occasional odor of popcorn swirling through, trying to busk up a few dollars. Skye saw the devil go by in his black '85 T-top, crooked smile, ponytail, twisty little braids in his beard. His skinny blond girlfriend sat beside him, tats running across her bare shoulders like grapevines, front teeth filed to tiny sharp points. Skye turned away, a chill running down her back.
-John Sanford, Gathering Prey
No item sold on Amazon has the ability to perform a life transplant.
Any Major Dude With Half a Heart offers his 20 major albums from 1976.
It would overstate things to say that 1976 was a great year for music, the release of a few absolute classics notwithstanding, but it was a satisfying year.
The basic ground of compassionate action is the importance of working with rather than struggling against, and what I mean by that is working with your own unwanted, unacceptable stuff, so that when the unacceptable and unwanted appears out there, you relate to it based on having working with loving-kindness on yourself.
We should all engage in capitalism in this country. In the United States, we believe capital belongs in the hands of the people. Communism teaches that capital belongs in the hands of the state. This is a great difference in ideology. Communism seems to be based on the idea that humans are too stupid to know what to do with capital, so it should all be given to the state to manage.
In our country, we believe the knowledge of what to do with capital resides in the populace. The people have the genius to come up with ideas for goods and services for the marketplace. This philosophy has built a dynamic enterprise known as capitalism and has created an abundance of opportunities.
-Jim Rohn, Leading an Inspired Life
What you need is access to the ways in which people explain themselves to themselves.
But just know that economic outcomes do not play out in a vacuum. There are trade-offs to consider.
-Ben Carlson, from here
But for all the impressive scholarship that has been marshaled in an effort to determine the Sistine Ceiling's elusive meanings and to unmask its secret author, the evidence strongly suggests that Michelangelo himself was almost entirely responsible for what we see, and that he developed the elaborate program organically in response to the demands—technical, conceptual, and esthetic—that confronted him when he discarded the pope's simplistic plan and opted for a more elaborate scheme. What we see is the product of Michelangelo's genius, not merely the skills of a consummate craftsman illustrating a theological text, but a passionate, unconventional vision of an artist who thought deeply about the miracle of Creation and developed his own unique language to confront life's most profound mysteries.
-Miles J. Unger, Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces
The problem with experts, put succinctly, is that experts are humans who are susceptible to all the human foibles. That ranges from being clueless about their own deficiencies to being downright evil.
Assuming anything benevolent about them, simply because they’re experts, is the surest way to make everything worse.
Should we listen to them? To a point. We need to consider what they have to say, but we also need to hear what the other experts have to say. We need to learn as much as we can before we do anything simply because an expert said it was a good thing.
-Tom Knighton, from this substack
Clarity isn't about knowing what you want to do with your life, it's about knowing what you want to do this week. You don't need to have it all figured out. You just need to know your next step.
-James Clear, from this edition
One can only prepare for the unpredictable by trying to keep an open and unprejudiced mind — a feat which is extremely difficult to achieve, even with the best will in the world. Indeed, a completely open mind would be an empty one, and freedom from all prejudices and preconceptions is an unattainable ideal. Yet there is one form of mental exercise that can provide good basic training for would-be prophets: Anyone who wishes to cope with the future should travel back in imagination a single life-time — say to 1900 — and ask himself just how much of today’s technology would be, not merely incredible, but incomprehensible to the keenest scientific brains of that time.
1900 is a good round date to choose because it was just about then that all hell started to break loose in science.
-Arthur C. Clarke, from his 1962 essay, Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination
If I could remember who set me off on the chase to find this essay, I would thank them
The God I follow has things to say about envy, and self-serving motivations. He offers a road that doesn't indulge peering at our neighbours' fields and fuming with our supposed lack. For you and I trying to get home, to become real human beings, to gather our thrown-away stories, this is a radical step in the right direction. You can be a pious monk in fifth-century Egypt or a burlesque dancer in modern New York, but we all turn green sometimes. Someone is our Akanida, someone evokes our smaller nature. There be monsters. Pat the gargoyle on the shoulder and tell it a story, I promise it will help. There are all sorts of accumulated hurt in us, all kinds of scuffs. A story helps settle the interior-den and brings these turbulent and evasive forces to the table. In my decades as a story-teller I have become much more honest. Stories are the most delightful vehicles for the brightening of consciousness. True, archaic technology.
-Martin Shaw, Liturgies of the Wild
It is better for the intellectual not to talk all the time. To begin with, it would exhaust him, and, above all, it would keep him from thinking.
“No” is a complete sentence! It’s the first word we learn when we are children. Do you want a bite of tapioca pudding? No. Do you want to go to bed? No. Somewhere, later in life, we lose our capacity to say no, and we go around saying yes to everyone, and our mouths are writing checks that our body can’t cash.
-Jared Dillian, from this substack essay
Swift adored London, with its endless variety and turbulent energy. In 1700 it was the largest city in Europe, with a population of six hundred thousand. That was three times as many people as in Shakespeare's day, and one-tenth of all the inhabitants of England. The London Shakespeare had known, less than a century, earlier was gone. In the Great Fire of 1666, four-fifths of the city center had been demolished, including the medieval St. Paul's Cathedral. Its stones, the diarist John Evelyn said, "flew like grenados, the melting lead running down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements glowing with fiery redness."
A year later, a poet captured the sense of astounding loss:
An immense rebuilding campaign was soon under way, and continued for decades. Sir Christopher Wren's new St. Paul's wasn't finished until 1710, thirty-five years after construction began. Wren and others proposed razing the tortuous old streets and alleys, replacing them with broad avenues on the continental model, but those plans were defeated by legal wrangling over property boundaries. In the end, new houses occupied pretty much the same spaces as the old. To the west of the burned zone, however, there were still empty fields, and development went forth energetically. All the time that Swift was in London, new buildings were going up and elegant squares taking shape.
-Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World
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| London 1700ish |
To be truly happy is a question of how we begin and not of how we end, of what we want and not of what we have. An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity. To have many of these is to be spiritually rich. Life is only a very dull and ill-directed theatre unless we have some interests in the piece; and to those who have neither art nor science, the world is a mere arrangement of colours, or a rough footway where they may very well break their shins. It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man continues to exist with even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure.
-Robert Louis Stevenson, from his essay El Dorado
Upon the battlefield of the human soul two masters are ever contending for the crown of supremacy for the kingship and dominion of the heart; the master of self, called also the Prince of this world, and the master of truth, called also that Father God. The master self if that rebellious one whose weapons are passion, pride, avarice, vanity, self-will, implements of darkness; the master truth is that meek and lovely one whose weapons are gentleness, patience, purity, sacrifice, humility, love, instruments of light.
In every soul the battle is waged, and as a soldier cannot engage at once in two opposing armies, so every heart is enlisted either in the ranks of self or of truth.
-James Allen, From Poverty to Power
Most years it was Phoebe Chadwick who got the ball rolling, usually in late January, when the weather was at its gloomiest and the streetlamp outside the window of her Bloomsbury office burned for days on end without a break. Phoebe was a senior project coordinator for a respected but perpetually underfunded international relief organization. Her work, while rewarding, left her forever short of financial resources herself. Her three closest friends all had piles of money. Sophie Maxwell worked for a Magic Circle law firm, and Ella Burns did something dubious in the City. Beautiful Alice Winter got her money the old-fashioned way. Alice had married it.
-Daniel Silva, Ransom
Mechanized scale brings productivity and certainty, but it also brings huge short-run rewards for cutting corners. Save a penny a loaf with a handmade product and it’s no big deal. Save a penny a loaf when you make 10,000 a day and it begins to add up to real money. So it pays to add a bit of stabilizer, change to a more reliable oven temperature and switch to a cheaper flour…
This is what people who care about quality are actually fretting about. It’s not the scale. It’s the shortcuts that sometimes come with it.
Quality, by definition, is meeting spec. If you don’t like the spec, make the spec better.
We can have scale and consistency and quality. But we can’t have all three at the same time when we race (or are pushed) to the bottom.
Bit by bit, we either make things better or we make them worse.
-Seth Godin, from this post
Look, alright, nobody, and I mean NOBODY, knows what they’re doing. I spent the first few decades of my life thinking everybody else received a Secret Pamphlet and that this pamphlet explained how to file taxes and when to leave a party and how to love someone without ruining it.
I didn’t get the pamphlet. I assumed it was just me. Nope. We’re all out here freestyling. Yeesh.
Still gotta answer the question though: How do we live a good life? Yeah, I’m gonna need some assistance…
Naturally, the person I decided to go to for help is a Greek guy who’s been dead for 2300 years.
-Eric Barker has the rest of the story here
Monopolists raise prices. Standard Oil cut prices. Ironically, it was Rockefeller’s successful determination to cut costs and prices that led economically uninformed historians to cast him as a villain. He did indeed make life difficult for his competitors, but in the process he also made life better for millions of consumers worldwide.
-Donald J. Boudreaux, from this post
Utopia is also impossible because it is friction which propels progress. Without the pressure of new problems, there is little reason for advancement. Some people think of utopia not as a destination but as an ideal, but even that is misleading because utopia ignores the inherent tradeoffs in every benefit. We don’t get better without also earning some new problems. Problem-free is a stagnant death zone, and nothing we should aim for.
-Kevin Kelly, from here
It is also true that having spent his formative years among the stonecutters of Settignano, Michelangelo had a feel for the material rare among artists and a respect for the laborers who actually did the backbreaking work of quarrying the stone. He was able to spot minute imperfections that would ruin the finished work, and to judge the density and consistency of the crystalline structure that would determine how the chisel would bite into the stone. Though Michelangelo did more than any other artist before him to lift the profession above the humble status of the artisan, he understood that such a leap into the stratosphere could not be launched without a firm grounding in craftsmanship. He was something of a paradox, a conjurer of cosmic ideas who fussed over the slightest details of his trade, knowing that only the most perfect forms were adequate vessels to contain the vastness of his imagination.
-Miles J. Unger, Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces
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| Michelangelo Pieta 1498-99 |
You can be anything you want to be.
No, you can't.
Not from your old mind's knowing. You weren't born to be anything you want; you were born to be something quite specific. There is a spiritual directive to your life that was assigned somewhere else before you were even born. There's a vocation to your years, even if they appear unremarkable to the rest of us. This is not a status-driven affair. This is a soul coaxed into listening. To be 'anything you want' is part of the chloroform of the anthropocentric, the usual empirical ambition dished out from toddlerhood to many of us. That doesn't mean you don't stretch and grow as you age, but that you build on an essential, not societal, sense of vocation.
-Martin Shaw, Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass
And all their logic would fill my head: As that I had no right to play With what was another man’s work for gain. My right might be love but theirs was need. And where the two exist in twain Theirs was the better right–agreed. But yield who will to their separation, My object in living is to unite My avocation and my vocation As my two eyes make one in sight. Only where love and need are one, And the work is play for mortal stakes, Is the deed ever really done For Heaven and the future’s sakes.
-Robert Frost, as he concludes my favorite poem, Two Tramps In Mud Time
I never put up a barber pole or a sign or even gave my shop a name. I didn't have to. The building was already called "the barber shop". That was its name because that had been its name for nobody knew how long. Port William had little written history. Its history was its living memory of itself, which passed over the years like a moving beam of light. It had a beginning that it had forgotten, and would have an end that it did not yet know. It seemed to have been there forever. After I had been there a while, the shop began to be called Jayber Crow's, or just Jayber's. "Well, I'm going down to Jayber's," people would say, as if it had been clearly marked on some map, though it was so only in their minds. I never had a telephone, so I was not even in the book.
-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership as Written by Himself
You are always responsible because you are always choosing. In every moment, you are choosing how to respond, how to react, how to see things.
Deliverance is out of time and into eternity, and is achieved by obedience and docility to the eternal Nature of Things. We have been given free will, in order that we may will our self-will out of existence and so come to live continuously in the "state of grace." All our actions must be directed, in the last analysis, to making ourselves passive in relation to the activity and the being of divine Reality. We are, as it were, aeolian harps, endowed with the power either to expose themselves to the wind of the Spirit or to shut themselves away from it.
-Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy
The forms of zest are innumerable. Sherlock Holmes, it may be remembered, picked up a hat which he happened to find lying in the street. After looking at it for a moment he remarked that its owner had come down in the world as a result of drink and that his wife was no longer so fond of him as she used to be. Life could never be boring to a man to whom casual objects offered such a wealth of interest. Think of the different things that may be noticed in the course of a country walk. One man may be interested in the birds, another in the vegetation, another in the geology, yet another in the agriculture, and so on. Any one of these things is interesting if it interests you, and, other things being equal, the man who is interested in any one of them is a man better adapted to the world than the man who is not interested.
-Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
Well, let’s go back to David Ausubel’s 1960 experiment. Ausubel gave college students a short conceptual overview before they read difficult, unfamiliar material. The students who got that overview, which he called an advance organizer, retained the material significantly better than the students who went in cold. The idea has held up for sixty years: before you learn something hard, your brain needs a scaffold, a rough map of what’s coming, so new information has somewhere to attach. Without the scaffold, a 2,800-year-old epic poem is just old names and boats. With the scaffold, every page slots into a picture your kid already has in their head.
-Austin Scholar, from this episode
People want to see justice done. It’s part of storytelling, and part of life. It’s not virtuous or kind to let marauders prey on the weak indefinitely. It’s not charitable to let brigands upend the order of a palace of a society. There’s nothing compassionate in letting villains off the hook.
-Spencer Klavan, commenting on Christopher Nolan's film, Odyssey
...............on intelligence, artificial and otherwise:
The common thread in all three of these examples is that AI may revolutionize productivity not by being much smarter than a single individual human — not by simply solving harder and harder math problems — but by marrying human-style intelligence to the vast, inhuman capabilities of computers. We could simply be thinking about the benefits of intelligence wrong — arrogantly privileging the kind of mental tasks we humans happen to do especially well, while ignoring the value of the tasks we do poorly.
Acceptance is not surrender. It is the moment you stop wasting energy on what is already true and start using that energy to decide what to do next.
-Shane Parrish, from this week's edition
My Sweetie and I ventured out to the greater Toboso region this morning and walked five +/- miles on the Black Hand Gorge trail. Hard to imagine a prettier walk.
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| The Licking River |
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| the "deep cut", created in the 1850s. Believe it or not, but trains used to run here 175 years ago. |
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| the site of the "black hand", destroyed during the canal construction days. Above the laid up stone, traces of the canal tow path still exist |
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| further proof, as if we needed any, that God loves life |
The intellectual as a champion of the masses is a relatively recent phenomenon. Education does not naturally waken in us a concern for the uneducated. The distinction conferred by education is more easily maintained by a sharp separation from those below than be a continued excellence of achievement. When Gandhi was asked by an American clergyman what it was that worried him the most, he replied: "The hardness of heart of the educated."
-Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change
I would say yes to a prayer that reaches out over the companionable objects of our day, yes to prayers for more charity, resilience, good-naturedness, and also a listening kind of praying that is tucked somewhere always in our heart, mystically turning to ever greater reality. What a woeful thing it would be to be denied prayer, to be numbed to its gratitude. We can live without a great deal, but to live entirely without prayer would leave us lesser human beings. Prayer changes our relationships with pretty much everything. It the tribulation of night I turn the wheel of my prayer rope and steer my ship over woeful seas. In the brightness of the longed-for dawn I stare east and am deep-rooted in the wallop of my amazement.
In the end, prayer isn't something we do, it becomes something that we are.
-Martin Shaw, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us
We have immersed ourselves to a few mega social media platforms. Angertainment is all the rage. If you think doom scrolling, keeping up with Jones’, and entrusting your engrossment to algos designed to keep you in a constant state of anxiety is the path, have at it. Come for the social isolation and stay for the subsequent depression.
-Tony Isola, from this post
Tolstoy searches in science, philosophy, wisdom and reason and finds no answer to convince him that life is worth living. Science answers many questions, but not the one that obsesses him. He sees too that meaning does not lie in something superadded to life: possessions, achievements, honours, awards. Those are externalities, gift-wrapping, not life itself. The answer that eventually came to Tolstoy was religious faith. 'No matter what answers faith may give, its every answer gives to the finite existence of man the sense of the infinite—a sense which is not destroyed by suffering, privation or death.' Faith, he said is a force of life. 'If a man lives, then he must believe in something.' If that something is finite, it will not ultimately satisfy him, since everything finite eventually perishes. The only thing worth believing in is the infinite. And, 'Without faith it is impossible to live.'
-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
There is an old saying that goes, "I slept and dreamed that life was beauty; I woke and saw that life was duty." If you really want to be in control of your life, and if you want other people to be able to depend on you and look to you for leadership, you must wake up from the dream that somebody else will handle the responsibility. You must accept the responsibility of leading both yourself and others. No one else can do it for you. And if you develop the skills of a highly effective leader, not one else can do it as well as you, either.
-Jim Rohn, Leading an Inspired Life
The Master was exceedingly gracious to the University dons who visited him, but he would never reply to their questions or be drawn into their theological speculations.
To his disciples, who marveled at this, he said, "Can one talk about the ocean to a frog in a well—or about the divine to people who are restricted by their concepts?"
-Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom
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