“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
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