Had I been familiar with that quotation attributed to Saint Augustus when addressing the Lord—"Give me chastity and continence, but not yet"—I'd have understood it. On these trips abroad, Guggi and I shared more than an interest in the scriptures. We were girl mad and had made ourselves available for French-kissing experimentations by the girlfriends of older boys. Nothing to complain about, but we needed to find our own girlfriends. In Criccieth my eyes fell on the very not mendacious Mandy, without doubt the most beautiful girl in all of Wales. It was if she'd been swept up on the beach, dark and gorgeous in a black bikini. I was thirteen, she was fourteen. I so wanted to be sixteen and have her never let me go. Which she did quite easily now I think of it.
Tuesday, April 18, 2023
testimony.......................
It is a marvelous testimony of the weakness of our judgment that it recommends things for their rarity or novelty, or even for their difficulty, even if they are neither good nor useful.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 1, Chapter54
insatiable...........................
That boy, as Franklin later recalled in his Autobiography, was "extremely ambitious" to become a "tolerable English Writer." Although literacy was relatively high in New England at this time—perhaps 75 percent of males in Boston could read and write and the percentage was rapidly growing—books were scarce and valuable, and few people read books the way Franklin did. He read everything he could get his hands on, including John Bunyan's Pilgram's Progress, Plutarch's Lives, Daniel DeFoe's Essay on Projects, the "do good" essays of the prominent Boston Puritan divine Cotton Mather, and more books of "polemic Divinity" than Franklin wanted to remember. He even befriended the apprentices of booksellers in order to gain access to more books. One of those apprentices allowed him secretly to borrow his master's books to read after work. "Often," Franklin recalled, "I sat up in my Room reading the greatest Part of the Night, when the Book was borrow'd in the Evening & to be return'd early in the Morning lest it should be miss'd or wanted.
-Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin
Nature's way.................
Nature transcends our tendencies to label and classify, to reduce and limit. The natural world is unfathomably more rich, interwoven, and complicated than we are taught, and so much more mysterious and beautiful.
-Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being
the important need to clarify..........
The opposite of "true" is not always "false". Sometimes, the opposite of one kind of truth is truth of a different kind, most clearly seen in the difference between literal and metaphoric truth. Fairy tales dwell in the latter world; they are true but unreal. To children, this distinction is important and they need no help in understanding it, although this is a complex idea.
Many adults know the situation, when they are telling (not reading) a story of the fairy-tale kind and the child interrupts to ask: "Is it true?" (If the adult is reading, it is clear to the child that it is from the story world and they don't ask.)
Is it true? the adult wonders, thinking about his goblin neighbors, troll boss, and the princess he has been secretly in love with for years, and answers thoughtfully, "Well, yes, it is true, in a way. In its own way it is true."
"But is it true like in real life?" the child persists.
"No," the adult will say, the distinction clear. "Not like in real life."
The child's question is not one of disbelief, but rather comes from the important need to clarify what kind of truth it is and therefore what kind of belief to give to it.
-Jay Griffiths, A Country Called Childhood: Children and the Exuberant World
Pause.........................
Detachment is the cost of our wondrous, liberating mobility, the price we pay for living untethered. Connection to place is replaced by inhabitation of space, bringing to near-culmination what Rosalind Williams describes as "humanity's decision to unbind itself from the soil." The tempo of travel blurs the landscape, and our vehicles increasingly enfold us in a bubble of remove. "The sights, sounds, tastes, temperatures, and smells of the city and countryside are reduced to a two-dimensional view through the car windscreen, something prefigured by the railway journeys of the nineteenth century," notes John Urry, echoing Nietzche. The portable soundscape of the Walkman-turned-iPod puts much of life at arm's length, creating a "fragile world of certainty within a contingent world," writes Michael Bull in Sounding Out the City. We are distancing ourselves from knowledge of our own bodily selves and our earth, as Bill McKibben observes. We live in an era when "vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach," he writes. "An unenlightenment." Pause is increasingly absent in a temporal sense, too. A culture of constant movement, in part fueled by a love of instant gratification, cannot bear the mystery and unpredictability inherent in the idea of pause. "For the sake of speed, in the interest of not wasting time, we sacrifice the sensuous richness of the not-yet," writes Noelle Oxenhandler in her essay "The Lost While." We live in a culture of "becoming" but never arriving.
-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age
Sunday, April 16, 2023
intrusive everythings..............
For most of human history, we lived in a world defined by scarcity: could we accumulate enough resources to survive the day? But now? We are drowning in an abundance of everything. A tsunami of notifications and distractions and a million intrusive everythings vying for our attention. When we have access to a near-infinite fountain of entertainment and distractions, the ability to focus and avoid distractions is one hell of a competitive advantage.
-Jack Raines, from here
Saturday, April 15, 2023
Simply..................
We don't have to understand nature to appreciate it. This is true of all things. Simply be aware of moments when your breath gets taken away by something of great beauty.
-Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being
things not understood............
Our appetite is irresolute and uncertain: it does not know how to keep anything or enjoy anything in the right way. Man, thinking that it is the fault of these things, fills and feeds himself on other things that he does not know and does not understand, to which he applies his desires and his hopes, and which he holds in honor and reverence; as Caesar says, 'it happens by a common vice of nature that we trust more, and fear more violently, things to us unseen, hidden, and unknown'.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 1, Chapter 53
Wednesday, April 12, 2023
submerge.................
. . . consider submerging yourself in the canon of great works. Read the finest literature, watch the masterpieces of cinema, get up close to the most influential paintings, visit architectural landmarks. There's no standard list; no one has the same measures of greatness. The "canon" is continually changing, across time and space. Nonetheless, exposure to great art provides an invitation. It draws us forward, and opens doors of possibility.
If you make the choice of reading classic literature every day for a year, rather than reading the news, by the end of that time period you'll have a more honed sensitivity for recognizing greatness from books than from the media.
This applies to every choice we make. Not just with art, but with the friends we choose, the conversations we have, even the thoughts we reflect on. All of these aspects affect our ability to distinguish good from very good, very good from great. They help us determine what's worthy of our time and attention.
-Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being
Tuesday, April 11, 2023
Monday, April 10, 2023
Belief.......................
There’s no need to sign up for the endless uphill battle of marketing against a positive trend. Sell something you believe in, to people who are eager to believe in it as well.
You’ll do your best work on behalf of an audience and a cause that deserves it, appreciates it and applauds it. If it’s just a job, you’ve sacrificed your best energy for a paycheck.
Pick your client, pick your future.
-Seth Godin, from here
We're a strange breed.....................
Consider the state of social media, where people frequently go in order to find something to be angry about, so that they can express their anger in ways that would typically be forbidden but are permissible in cases only of having been wronged. Had the social media user not sought out an example of someone doing something offensive or outrageous, they wouldn’t have anger to discharge, but it seems to me that acquiring anger and the right to discharge it is precisely the point. (Cable TV also offers you lots of reasons to get pissed off at people and yell at them.)
-Elizabeth Bruenig, from this longish essay on forgiveness
dangerously certain....................
In the National Assembly, in its two and a half years, Robespierre made some five hundred speeches, usually too long to be convincing, and too argumentative to be eloquent; but the masses of Paris, learning of their tenor, loved him for them. He opposed racial or religious discrimination, proposed emancipation of the blacks, and became, till his final months, the tribune and defender of the people. He accepting the institution of private property, but wished to universalize small-scale ownership as an economic basis for a sturdy democracy. He called inequality of wealth "a necessary and incurable evil," rooted in the natural inequality of human ability. In this period he supported the retention of the monarchy, properly limited; an attempt to overthrow Louis XVI, he thought, would lead to such chaos and bloodshed as would end in a dictatorship more tyrannical than a King.
Not till near his end did he seem to doubt the full identity of his judgment with the popular will. His mind was weaker than his will; most of his ideas were borrowed from his reading, or from the catchwords that filled the revolutionary air; he died too young to have acquired sufficient experience of life, or knowledge of history, to check his abstract or copular conceptions with patient perception or impartial prospective. He suffered severely from our common failing—he could not get his ego out of the way of his eyes. The passion of his utterance convinced himself; he became dangerously certain and ludicrously vain. "That man," said Mirabeau, "will go far, he believes all that he says." He went to the guillotine.
-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon
the limits of moderation.............
Mirabeau begged the deputies to retain the King as a bulwark against social disorder and mob rule. He pictured Louis XVI as a man of good heart and generous intentions, occasionally confused by shortsighted counselors; and he asked, prophetically:
"Have these men studied, in the history of any people, how revolutions commence and how they are carried out? Have they observed by what a fatal chain of circumstances the wisest men are driven far beyond the limits of moderation, and by what terrible impulses an enraged people is precipitated into excesses at the very thought of which they would have shuddered."
The delegates followed his advice, for they too felt the groundswells emanating from the sidewalks of Paris. But instead of meeting a measured loyalty with substantial concessions to the Third Estate, Louis outraged radicals and liberals alike by dismissing Necker a second time, replacing him with the Queen's uncompromising friend Baron de Breteuil, and making the warrior de Broglie minister for war. The chips were down.
-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon
She makes it sound like...................
...................there is something wrong with "rootedness:"
We struggle now to update our ideas of home and place for a new unbounded era, naturally wishing to shed outdated notions of stasis and rootedness.
-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age
Why.......................
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