The Four Tops.....Standing in the Shadows of Love
Tuesday, August 18, 2026
Checking up on Patrick O'Brian..............
In Desolation Island (1978), the fifth novel in the series, Maturin invokes the costs of a life “spent in dissimulation”—regretting how “the long-lived lie soak[s] into the liar’s deepest fibre.”
-Tim Lake, from his essay, Read the Novels and Forget Everything Else
Let's keep it that way.............
Old age keeps being put back, like the completion of a government building project.
-Theodore Dalrymple, In Search of the Consolations of Age
Rooting against the maths..............
A theory of intelligence might also finally decouple intelligence from consciousness. Intelligence is likely a computational quantity; consciousness is a phenomenal one. Of course, there is a chance that we might discover there is no general theory of intelligence at all; that like life, intelligence is a squishy, messy, almost illusionary phenomenon that cannot be encapsulated into a mathematical formula. That would be unfortunate, but good to know sooner rather than later.
-Kevin Kelly, from this substack episode
Yes and no.............
No’s mean more than yes’s. Saying yes is easy—people say yes to things they don't care about all the time.
Saying no requires you to be willing to lose something. That's how you know it's real.
-Mark Manson, from here
On Peter Drucker and future breadwinners...
Born in Vienna in 1909, Drucker stumbled onto the writing of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard when he was only 19. To give you a sense of what Drucker was all about, he began studying Danish simply so that he could read Kierkegaard’s at-that-time-still-untranslated writings. By 1933, he was a lecturer in the German city of Frankfurt. When the Nazi government fired all the Jewish professors on staff, Drucker decided he could not and would not be complicit in the abuses of the autocratic regime. He left for London a couple of days later.
-Ari Weinzweig, from this issue
Monday, August 17, 2026
impressed........................
For practical purposes, the financial memory should be assumed to last, at a maximum, no more than 20 years. This is normally the time it takes for the recollection of one disaster to be erased and for some variant of the previous dementia to come forward to capture the financial mind. It is also the time generally required for a new generation to cone on the scene, impressed, as had been its predecessors, with its own financial genius.
-John Kenneth Galbraith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria
who knew.........................
The world was built by practical people who knew how to get into a creative frame of mind, listen to their imaginations, and build on the ideas they found there.
-Roger van Oech, A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative
Compounding and the long haul.............
As Charlie Munger once said, "The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily."
Compounding might be the eighth wonder of the world, but it takes time to morph from a caterpillar into a butterfly. . . .
Compounding in a retirement calculator is neat and tidy. Compounding in the stock market it messy and lumpy. . . .
If you want consistency over the long haul, you have to accept lower returns. And if you want higher returns over the long haul, you have to accept volatility. You can never truly escape risk; you just change how you accept it.
-Ben Carlson, Risk & Reward
last year's leaf...............
"Is it well with you?" he asked.
And the old man answered, "It is well."
"There be wood beside you," the younger man continued, "and the fire burns bright. The morning is gray and the cold has broken. It will snow presently. Even now it is snowing."
"Ay, even now it is snowing."
"The tribesmen hurry. Their bales are heavy, and their bellies flat with lack of feasting. The trail is long and they travel fast. I go now. It is well?"
"It is well. I am as a last year's leaf, clinging lightly to the stem. The first breath that blows, and I fall. My voice is become like an old woman's. My eyes no longer show me the way of my feet, and my feet are heavy, and I am tired. It is well."
He bowed his head in content till the last noise of the complaining snow had died away, and he knew his son was beyond recall. Then his hand crept out in haste to the wood. It alone stood betwixt him and the eternity which yawned upon him. At last the measure of his life was a handful of faggots. One by one they would go to feed the fire, and just so, step by step, death would creep upon him. When the last stick had surrendered up its heat, the frost would begin to gather strength. First his feet would yield, then his hands; and the numbness would travel slowly, from the extremities to the body. His head would fall forward upon his knees, and he would rest. It was easy. All men must die.
-Jack London, The Law of Life
In the spring of 1824................
Congress, in issuing the invitation Monroe transmitted, reflected a national willingness to see the young hero, now old, one more time. In looking at Lafayette, Americans could look back. When men invented calendars they invented anniversaries, with all the mental freight that anniversaries carry. The Battles of Lexington and Concord had been fought in April 1775, the Battle of Bunker Hill that June. Their fiftieth anniversaries were approaching. Congress had commissioned John Trumbull, America's most eminent artist, to decorate the Rotunda of the Capital with four huge paintings celebrating the Revolution; Lafayette would appear in one of them. Only three signers of the Declaration of Independence—Adams, Jefferson, and Charles Carroll of Carrolton—still lived. Only one major general of the revolutionary army still lived—Lafayette. Revolutionary War veterans survived in every city and many towns, but now they were all gray. If one wanted to see and celebrate the Revolution as a living event, now was the last opportunity.
-Richard Brookhiser, The Hero Returns: Lafayette and the Legacy of Revolution
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| The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis John Trumbull oil on canvas 1819-20 |
bonfires........................
“If you want to do something, make a habit of it, if you don’t want to do that, don’t, but make a habit of something else instead.”
Epictetus said habits—good and bad—were like a bonfire. Every time we perform a habit, we reinforce it. We add fuel to the fire. “Every habit and capability is confirmed and grows in its corresponding actions, walking by walking, and running by running,” Epictetus said, “therefore, the same principle is at work in our state of mind. When you get angry, you’ve not only experienced that evil, but you’ve also reinforced a bad habit, adding fuel to the fire.” It was likely one of the many lessons he learned from his teacher, Musonius Rufus. Rufus was perhaps the earliest philosopher to identify the power of habits. In “many circumstances,” he said, “we do not deal with our affairs in accordance with correct assumptions, but rather we follow thoughtless habit.”
-as cut-and-pasted from Sunday's Daily Stoic
Sunday, August 16, 2026
Buck......................
All day Buck brooded by the pool or roamed restlessly about the camp. Death, as a cessation of movement, as a passing out and away from the lives of the living, he knew, and he knew John Thornton was dead. It left a great void in him, somewhat akin to hunger, but a void which ached and ached, and which food could not fill. At times, when he paused to contemplate the carcasses of the Yeehats, he forgot the pain of it; and at such times he was aware of a great pride in himself—a pride greater than any he had yet experienced. He had killed man, the noblest game of all, and he had killed in the face of the law of club and fang. He sniffed the bodies curiously. They had died so easily. It was harder to kill a husky dog than them. They were not match at all, were it not for their arrows and spears and clubs. Thenceforward he would be unafraid of them except when they bore in their hands their arrows, spears, and clubs.
-Jack London, The Call of the Wild
deactivate circuits..................
For both meditation and playing music, this means the brain needs to deactivate circuits associated with self-consciousness and with judgment—the finger-wagging schoolteacher in your brain that is saying "that's terrible!" or "you're not good enough." That school marm is useful when you are editing, but anathema to creativity and spontaneity.
-Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine
We....................
"These wounds are my pride," he said. "I received them fighting for the independence of my country. Your blood, my general, flowed the same day . . . where we were so unfortunate." At Brandywine, the enemy had outflanked the defenders and forced them to flee in confusion. Lafayette, faint from loss of blood, had been led from the field but had stayed at a bridge on a road behind the lines in Chester, Pennsylvania, to make order among the retreating men.
"It was indeed a rough day," Lafayette said now, forty-eight years later, "but have we not since been deeply indemnified?"
Whom did he mean by we? Lafayette had a gift—shown hundreds of times on his American tour—of connecting quickly and warmly with the people before him, no matter their age or sex, class or race. These bursts of spontaneous fraternity were especially strong with veterans of the Revolution. In that moment in Natchez, we meant, first and foremost, the two comrades of 1777. Young once, they had lived to old age; wounded, they were now whole; mementoes of pain had become souvenirs of glory. This was simple indemnification for them, for any old soldier: We struggled, sometimes we lost, but we have prevailed and endured.
But Lafayette's we was also meant to encompass the American people, among whom he always included himself. This we had won independence from their colonial masters and had maintained it through decades of international upheaval, including a second shooting war with Britain. The country Americans had created and passed on to a new generation was, or seemed, united, prosperous, orderly, free, and self-ruled. Once children of a royal patriarch, cogs in an imperial machine, they now ran their own affairs—and evidently ran them well. This was indemnification, not for two men but for millions.
-Richard Brookhiser, The Hero Returns: Lafayette and the Legacy of Revolution
Opening paragraphs.............
I know what you're going to ask me," Spike said. "And the answer is yes."
-Alison Gaylin, Robert B. Parker's Booked: A Sunny Randall Novel
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