p. 195 Science is very conservative, and its stability rests on the idea that new understandings of the world must fit in with the previous knowledge about it. Biologist E. O. Wilson has used the term "consilience" to describe this, the "jumping together" of knowledge when facts and theories from different areas link and form a common foundation of knowledge. As he says, "the explanations of different phenomena most likely to survive are those that can be connected and proved consistent with one another."
p. 224 The idea of the emotional connection, but not the roles, enduring across lifetimes can affect the way that parents look at their children, because it suggests that parents need to provide discipline for their children, not in a domineering or harsh way, but as guidance for fellow travelers. Children can be seen as equal partners sharing life's journey instead of inferior beings, even though they are partners that need direction and need to feel a sense of security that their parents are in control.
Thursday, December 17, 2015
Sunday, November 29, 2015
Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher, r. Nov. 2015
p. 30 For someone used to the doldrums and ditchwater of latter-day academic writing, reading Gladstone's chapter on color comes as rather a shock - that of meeting an extraordinary mind. One is left in awe by the originiality, the daring, the razor-sharp analysis, and that breathless feeling that however fast one is trying to run through the argument in one's own mind, Gladstone is always two steps ahead, and, whatever objection one tries to raise, he has preempted several pages before one has even thought of it.
p. 202 Why does the German feminine sun (die Sonne) light up the masculine day (der Tag), and the masculine moon (der Mond) shine in the feminine night (die Nacht)? After all, in French, he (le jour) is actually illuminated by him (le soleil), whereas she (la nuit) by her (la lune). German cutlery famously spans the whole gamut of gender roles: Das Messer (knife) may be an it, but on the opposite side of the plate lies the spoon (der Löffel) in his resplendent masculinity, and next to him, bursting with sex appeal, the feminine fork (die Gabel). But in Spanish, it's the fork (el tenedor) that has a hairy chest and gravelly voice, and she, the spoon (la cuchara), a curvaceous figure.
p. 239 But ye readers of posterity, forgive us our ignorances, as we forgive those who were ignorant before us. The mystery of heredity has been illuminated for us, but we have seen this great light only because our predecessors never tired of searching in the dark. So if you, O subsequent ones, ever deign to look down at us from your summit of effortless superiority, remember tha you have only scaled it on the back of our efforts. For it is thankless to grope in the dark and tempting to rest until the light of understanding shines upon us. But if we are led into this temptation, your kingdom will never come.
p. 202 Why does the German feminine sun (die Sonne) light up the masculine day (der Tag), and the masculine moon (der Mond) shine in the feminine night (die Nacht)? After all, in French, he (le jour) is actually illuminated by him (le soleil), whereas she (la nuit) by her (la lune). German cutlery famously spans the whole gamut of gender roles: Das Messer (knife) may be an it, but on the opposite side of the plate lies the spoon (der Löffel) in his resplendent masculinity, and next to him, bursting with sex appeal, the feminine fork (die Gabel). But in Spanish, it's the fork (el tenedor) that has a hairy chest and gravelly voice, and she, the spoon (la cuchara), a curvaceous figure.
p. 239 But ye readers of posterity, forgive us our ignorances, as we forgive those who were ignorant before us. The mystery of heredity has been illuminated for us, but we have seen this great light only because our predecessors never tired of searching in the dark. So if you, O subsequent ones, ever deign to look down at us from your summit of effortless superiority, remember tha you have only scaled it on the back of our efforts. For it is thankless to grope in the dark and tempting to rest until the light of understanding shines upon us. But if we are led into this temptation, your kingdom will never come.
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Is That A Fish In Your Ear? by David Bellos, r. Nov. 2015
p. 145 When you have to pay attention to more than one dimension of an utterance - when your mind is engaged in multilevel pattern-matching pursuits - you find resources in your language you never knew were there.
p. 166 To expand our minds and to become more fully civilized members of the human race, we should learn as many different languages as we can. The diversity of tongues is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts.
p. 195 ...translation always takes the register and level of naturally written prose up a notch or two. Some degree of raising is and always has been characteristic of translated texts simply because translators are instinctively averse to the risk of being taken for less than fully cultivated writers of their target tongue. In important ways, translators are the guardians and, to a surprising degree, the creators of the standard form of the language they use.
p. 216 The solar structure of the global book world wasn't designed by anyone. With its all-powerful English sun, major planets called French and German, outer elliptical rings where Russian occasionally crosses the path of Spanish and Italian, and its myriad distant satellites no weightier than stardust, the system is all the mor remarkable for being in stark contradiction to the weblike network of cross-cultural relations that most people would like to see.
p. 239 As one lawyer working [at the EU] said to me when I visited, he never really thinks about which of his four languages he is speaking or writing at any given time - he switches without conscious effort, as if he were just shifting the weight of his shoulder bag from the left to the right side.
p. 253 Languages can always be squeezed and shaped to fit the needs that humans have...
p. 290 For Thirlwell, novelistic "style" is the name of a holistic entity that comes somewhere between "a writer's special way of looking at the world" and "a writer's own way of writing novels."
p. 293 There aren't many publishing executives in Britain and the United States who read foreign languages other than French.... the English translator is often the only person in the chain who really knows very much about the book or its author at all. It's a daunting position, with responsibilities going far beyond the already difficult business of producing an acceptable and effective translation.
p. 324 Like [the movie Avatar], the practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different - we speak different tongues and see the world in ways that are deeply influenced by the particular features of the tongue that we speak. The second is that we are all the same - that we can share the same broad and narrow kinds of feelings, information, understandings, and so forth. Without both of the suppositions, translation could not exist.... Translation is another name for the human condition.
p. 338 It's not poetry but community that is lost in translation. The community-building role of actual language use is simply not part of what translation does.
p. 166 To expand our minds and to become more fully civilized members of the human race, we should learn as many different languages as we can. The diversity of tongues is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts.
p. 195 ...translation always takes the register and level of naturally written prose up a notch or two. Some degree of raising is and always has been characteristic of translated texts simply because translators are instinctively averse to the risk of being taken for less than fully cultivated writers of their target tongue. In important ways, translators are the guardians and, to a surprising degree, the creators of the standard form of the language they use.
p. 216 The solar structure of the global book world wasn't designed by anyone. With its all-powerful English sun, major planets called French and German, outer elliptical rings where Russian occasionally crosses the path of Spanish and Italian, and its myriad distant satellites no weightier than stardust, the system is all the mor remarkable for being in stark contradiction to the weblike network of cross-cultural relations that most people would like to see.
p. 239 As one lawyer working [at the EU] said to me when I visited, he never really thinks about which of his four languages he is speaking or writing at any given time - he switches without conscious effort, as if he were just shifting the weight of his shoulder bag from the left to the right side.
p. 253 Languages can always be squeezed and shaped to fit the needs that humans have...
p. 290 For Thirlwell, novelistic "style" is the name of a holistic entity that comes somewhere between "a writer's special way of looking at the world" and "a writer's own way of writing novels."
p. 293 There aren't many publishing executives in Britain and the United States who read foreign languages other than French.... the English translator is often the only person in the chain who really knows very much about the book or its author at all. It's a daunting position, with responsibilities going far beyond the already difficult business of producing an acceptable and effective translation.
p. 324 Like [the movie Avatar], the practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different - we speak different tongues and see the world in ways that are deeply influenced by the particular features of the tongue that we speak. The second is that we are all the same - that we can share the same broad and narrow kinds of feelings, information, understandings, and so forth. Without both of the suppositions, translation could not exist.... Translation is another name for the human condition.
p. 338 It's not poetry but community that is lost in translation. The community-building role of actual language use is simply not part of what translation does.
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
The Red Badge of Courage and Four Great Stories by Stephen Crane, r. Oct. 2015
p. 52 The youth looked keenly at the ashen face [of the dead soldier]. The wind raised the tawny beard. It moved as if a hand were stroking it. He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.
p. 128 He did not give a great deal of thought to these battles that lay directly before him. It was not essential that he should plan his ways in regard to them. He had been taught that many obligations of a life were easily avoided. The lessons of yesterday had been that retribution was a laggard and blind. With these facts before him he did not dream it necessary that he should become feverish over the possibilities of the ensuing twenty-four hours. He could leave much to chance.
p. 199 A changed tide tried to force them southward, but wind and wave said northward. Far ahead, where coast-line, sea, and sky formed their mighty angle, there were little dots which seemed to indicate a city on the shore.
p. 308 The autumn smote the leaves, and the trees of Whilomville were panoplied in crimson and yellow. The winds grew stronger, and in the melancholy purple of the nights the home shine of a window became a finer thing. The little boys, watching the sear and sorrowful leaves drifting down from the maples, dreamed of the near time when they could heap bushels in the streets and burn them during the abrupt evenings.
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Pillar of Sand by Sandra Postel, r. Oct. 2015
p. 237 ...look for what works rather than what is theoretically correct, and do not let the perfect become the enemy of the good.
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
An Island to Oneself by Tom Neale, r. Sep. 2015
p. 19 I chose to live in the Pacific islands because life
there moves at the sort of pace which you feel God must have had in mind
originally when He made the sun to keep us warm and provided the fruits of the
earth for the taking…
p. 77 Almost without noticing it, I slipped into the routine
that was to become my life. Early morning had a familiar sound for I was
regularly awakened by a rooster just before dawn. I would lie there relaxed for
a little, thinking how lucky I was to look forward to a day which was going to
bring me nothing but satisfaction.
p. 141 I remember thinking, too, how vastly different their
lives were going to be from mine once their pleasant cruise was over. Even when
they reached Apia in Samoa there would be bright lights (of a sort), cars, busy
streets, cinemas, hotels; so-called luxuries which, however desirable, exacted
their own price in tensions, problems, congested humanity.
Thursday, September 10, 2015
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, r. Sep. 2015
p. 16 Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.
p. 54 Under a row of pear trees - once an orchard? - I laid me down and idled, an art perfected during my long convalescence. An idler and a sluggard are as different as a gourmand and a glutton.
p. 55 Vyvyan spurns praise, both giving and receiving it. He says, 'If people praise you, you're not walking your own path.'
p. 61 I notice he rarely proposes alternatives for the systems he ridicules. "Liberality? Timidity in the rich!" "Socialism? The younger brother of a decrepit despotism, which it wants to succeed" "Conservatives? Adventitious liars, whose doctrine of free will is their greatest deception." What sort of state does he want? "None! The better organized the state, the duller its humanity."
p. 75 Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I've stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again.
p. 86 Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying good-bye.
p. 177 I strode on. Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves.
p. 225 I play Go against my sony, I said. "To relax?" he responded, incredulous. "Who wins, you or the sony?" The sony, I answered, or how would I ever improve? So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners? I said, If losers can xploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.
p. 227 Purebloods, it seemed, were a sponge of demand that sucked goods and services from every vendor, dinery, bar, shop, and nook.
p. 235 the vacant (movie theater) was a haunting frame for those lost, rainy landscapes. Giants strode the screen, lit by sunlite contured thru a lens when your grandfather's grandfather, Archivist, was kicking in his natural womb. Time is the speed at which the past decays, but [movies] enable a brief resurrection. Those since fallen buildings, those long-eroded faces. Your present, not we, is the true illusion, they seem to say.
p. 265 So many feelin's I'd got I din't have room 'nuff for 'em. Oh, bein' young ain't easy 'cos ev'rythin' you're puzzlin'n'ankin' you're puzzlin'n'anxin' it for the first time.
p. 303 So, I asked 'gain, is it better to be savage'n to be Civ'lized? List'n, savages and Civ'lizeds ain't divvied by tribes or b'liefs or mountain ranges, nay, ev'ry human is both, yay. Old Uns'd got the Smart o' gods but the savagery o' jackals an' that's what tripped the Fall. Some savages what I knowed got a beautsome Civ'lized heart beatin' in their ribs.
p. 326 All revolutions are [fantasy and lunacy], until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.
p. 331 Few colonists live as long as upstrata consumers. They bicker, blame, and grieve as people will, but at least they do it in a community, and companionship is a fine medicine in itself. Nea So Copros has no communities now, only mutually suspicious substrata.
p. 344 My fifth Declaration posits how, in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights," the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful.
p. 349 As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.
p. 362 She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman.
p. 363 It's true, reading too many novels makes you go blind.
p. 387 ...but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.
p. 449 ...nothing is more tiresome than being told what to admire, and having things pointed at with a stick. Can scarcely recall the name of a single sight. By the itinerary's finale, the great clock tower, my jaw was hurting from all the yawns I'd suppressed.
p. 470 People are obscenities. Would rather by music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function.
p. 54 Under a row of pear trees - once an orchard? - I laid me down and idled, an art perfected during my long convalescence. An idler and a sluggard are as different as a gourmand and a glutton.
p. 55 Vyvyan spurns praise, both giving and receiving it. He says, 'If people praise you, you're not walking your own path.'
p. 61 I notice he rarely proposes alternatives for the systems he ridicules. "Liberality? Timidity in the rich!" "Socialism? The younger brother of a decrepit despotism, which it wants to succeed" "Conservatives? Adventitious liars, whose doctrine of free will is their greatest deception." What sort of state does he want? "None! The better organized the state, the duller its humanity."
p. 75 Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I've stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again.
p. 86 Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying good-bye.
p. 177 I strode on. Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves.
p. 225 I play Go against my sony, I said. "To relax?" he responded, incredulous. "Who wins, you or the sony?" The sony, I answered, or how would I ever improve? So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners? I said, If losers can xploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.
p. 227 Purebloods, it seemed, were a sponge of demand that sucked goods and services from every vendor, dinery, bar, shop, and nook.
p. 235 the vacant (movie theater) was a haunting frame for those lost, rainy landscapes. Giants strode the screen, lit by sunlite contured thru a lens when your grandfather's grandfather, Archivist, was kicking in his natural womb. Time is the speed at which the past decays, but [movies] enable a brief resurrection. Those since fallen buildings, those long-eroded faces. Your present, not we, is the true illusion, they seem to say.
p. 265 So many feelin's I'd got I din't have room 'nuff for 'em. Oh, bein' young ain't easy 'cos ev'rythin' you're puzzlin'n'ankin' you're puzzlin'n'anxin' it for the first time.
p. 303 So, I asked 'gain, is it better to be savage'n to be Civ'lized? List'n, savages and Civ'lizeds ain't divvied by tribes or b'liefs or mountain ranges, nay, ev'ry human is both, yay. Old Uns'd got the Smart o' gods but the savagery o' jackals an' that's what tripped the Fall. Some savages what I knowed got a beautsome Civ'lized heart beatin' in their ribs.
p. 326 All revolutions are [fantasy and lunacy], until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.
p. 331 Few colonists live as long as upstrata consumers. They bicker, blame, and grieve as people will, but at least they do it in a community, and companionship is a fine medicine in itself. Nea So Copros has no communities now, only mutually suspicious substrata.
p. 344 My fifth Declaration posits how, in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights," the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful.
p. 349 As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.
p. 362 She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman.
p. 363 It's true, reading too many novels makes you go blind.
p. 387 ...but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.
p. 449 ...nothing is more tiresome than being told what to admire, and having things pointed at with a stick. Can scarcely recall the name of a single sight. By the itinerary's finale, the great clock tower, my jaw was hurting from all the yawns I'd suppressed.
p. 470 People are obscenities. Would rather by music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function.
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Night by Elie Wiesel, r. Aug. 2015
p. 2 [Moishe the Beadle] explained to me with great insistence that every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer. "Man raises himself to God by the questions he asks Him," he was fond of repeating. "That is the true dialogue. Man questions God and God answers. But we don't understand His answers. We can't understand them."
Friday, August 21, 2015
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay by Michael Chabon, r. Aug. 2015
p. 340 The rest of the world was busy feeding itself, country by country, to the furnace, but while the city's newspapers and newsreels at the Trans-Lux were filled with ill portents, defeats, atrocities, and alarms, the general mentality of the New Yorker was not one of siege, panic, or grim resignation to fate but rather the toe-wiggling, tea-sipping contentment of a woman curled on a sofa, reading in front of a fire with cold rain rattling against the windows. The economy was experiencing a renewal not only of sensation but of perceptible movement in its limbs, Joe DiMaggio hit safely in fifty-six straight games, and the great big bands reached their suave and ecstatic acme in the hotel ballrooms and moth-lit summer pavilions of America.
p. ? Though she had worked partly from a photograph this time, the details of Joe's body and face were filled in from memory, a process she had found challenging and satisfying. You had to know your lover very well - to have spent a lot of time looking at him and touching him - to be able to paint his picture when he was not around. The inevitable mistakes and exaggerations she had made struck her now as proofs, artifacts, of the mysterious intercourse of memory and love.
p. ? The Antarctic Waldorf was heated by a gasoline stove, affectionately known as Wayne because of the legend FT. WAYNE IRON WORKS INDIANA USA stamped on its side. The naming madness that came over men when they arrived here in the unmapped blankness seeped quickly into every corner of their lives. They named the radios, the latrine, they named their hangovers and cuts on their fingers.
p. ? Though she had worked partly from a photograph this time, the details of Joe's body and face were filled in from memory, a process she had found challenging and satisfying. You had to know your lover very well - to have spent a lot of time looking at him and touching him - to be able to paint his picture when he was not around. The inevitable mistakes and exaggerations she had made struck her now as proofs, artifacts, of the mysterious intercourse of memory and love.
p. ? The Antarctic Waldorf was heated by a gasoline stove, affectionately known as Wayne because of the legend FT. WAYNE IRON WORKS INDIANA USA stamped on its side. The naming madness that came over men when they arrived here in the unmapped blankness seeped quickly into every corner of their lives. They named the radios, the latrine, they named their hangovers and cuts on their fingers.
Sunday, August 9, 2015
Although Of Course In The End You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky, r. Aug. 2015
All quotes are by David Foster Wallace unless noted
p. 3 As if how good a writer you are and how good a teacher you are have anything to do with each other. I don't think so. I know too many really good writers who are shitty teachers, and vice versa, to think that. I think that the teaching... well, the teaching has helped my own writing a lot...
p. 16 ...somebody who's writing, has part of their motivation to sort of I think impress themselves and their consciousness on others. There's an unbelievable arrogance about even trying to write something - much less, you know, expecting that someone else will pay money to read it.
p. 36 My tastes in reading lately have been way more realistic, because most experimental stuff is hellaciously unfun to read.
p. 41 ...if the writer does his job right, what he basically does in remind the reader of how smart the reader's been aware of all the time. And it's not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person. It's that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff, and develop... and just, and think really hard. Which not everybody has the luxury to do.
p. 69 And I think that the ultimate way you and I get lucky is if you have some success early in life, you get to find out early it doesn't mean anything. Which means you get to start early the work of figuring out what does mean something.
p. 85 The problem is [TV]'s also very empty. Because one of the differences about having a real person there is that number one, I've gotta do some work. Like, he pays attention to me, I gotta pay attention to him. You know: I watch him, he watches me. The stress level goes up. But there's also, there's something nourishing about it, because I think like as creatures, we've all got to figure out how to be together in the same room. And so TV is like candy in that it's more pleasurable and easier than the real food. But it also doesn't have any of the nourishment of real food.
p. 180 Well, then I can tell you, from authoritative firsthand experience that there's nothing like - there's no keen, exquisite pleasure that corresponds with the keen exquisite pain of envying somebody older. Who's written something, or won some tournament, that you particularly admire.
p. 199 Because the predictability in popular art, the really formulaic stuff, the stuff that makes no attempt to surprise or do anything artistic, is so profoundly soothing. And it even, even the densest or most tired viewer can see what's coming. And it gives you a sense of order, that everything's going to be all right, that this is a narrative that will take care of you, and won't in any way challenge you.
p. 203 I mean that's probably ultimately why novels and movies have it over short stories, as on art form. Is that if the heart of the short story is dishonest, there aren't enough of the little flashes to keep you going. Whereas in a novel or a movie, even if the central project doesn't work, there are often ten or fifteen great, great, great things.
p. 266 [On his landscape (outside Bloomington), the long fields] When the wind blows, you can see ripples, it's like water. It's like the ocean, except it's really green. I mean, it really is. Not so much here. But you get another mile south, where it's nothing but serious full-time farmland and farmhouses? Sort of calm, real pretty.
p. 290 Today's person spends way more time in front of screens. In fluorescent-lit rooms, in cubicles, being on one end or the other of an electronic data transfer. And what is it to be human and alive and exercise you humanity in that kind of exchange? Versus fifty years ago, when the big thing was, I don't know that, havin' a house and a garden and driving ten miles to your light industrial job. And livin' and dyin' in the same town that you're in, and knowing what other towns looked like only from photographs and the occasional movie reel. I mean, there's just so much that seems different, and the speed with which it gets different is just...
p. 291 I think the reason why people behave in an ugly manner is that it's really scary to be alive and to be human, and people are really really afraid.
p. 294 Nice to have your borders redefined, though, by physical contact with another person... I'm not just a set of anxieties and ambitions. I'm a person confined to a limited range, realize your head is only a half-foot-long space, etc. - David Lipsky on physical relations with your significant other
p. 307 It's good to want a child to do well, but it's bad to want that glory to reflect back on you.
p. 3 As if how good a writer you are and how good a teacher you are have anything to do with each other. I don't think so. I know too many really good writers who are shitty teachers, and vice versa, to think that. I think that the teaching... well, the teaching has helped my own writing a lot...
p. 16 ...somebody who's writing, has part of their motivation to sort of I think impress themselves and their consciousness on others. There's an unbelievable arrogance about even trying to write something - much less, you know, expecting that someone else will pay money to read it.
p. 36 My tastes in reading lately have been way more realistic, because most experimental stuff is hellaciously unfun to read.
p. 41 ...if the writer does his job right, what he basically does in remind the reader of how smart the reader's been aware of all the time. And it's not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person. It's that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff, and develop... and just, and think really hard. Which not everybody has the luxury to do.
p. 69 And I think that the ultimate way you and I get lucky is if you have some success early in life, you get to find out early it doesn't mean anything. Which means you get to start early the work of figuring out what does mean something.
p. 85 The problem is [TV]'s also very empty. Because one of the differences about having a real person there is that number one, I've gotta do some work. Like, he pays attention to me, I gotta pay attention to him. You know: I watch him, he watches me. The stress level goes up. But there's also, there's something nourishing about it, because I think like as creatures, we've all got to figure out how to be together in the same room. And so TV is like candy in that it's more pleasurable and easier than the real food. But it also doesn't have any of the nourishment of real food.
p. 180 Well, then I can tell you, from authoritative firsthand experience that there's nothing like - there's no keen, exquisite pleasure that corresponds with the keen exquisite pain of envying somebody older. Who's written something, or won some tournament, that you particularly admire.
p. 199 Because the predictability in popular art, the really formulaic stuff, the stuff that makes no attempt to surprise or do anything artistic, is so profoundly soothing. And it even, even the densest or most tired viewer can see what's coming. And it gives you a sense of order, that everything's going to be all right, that this is a narrative that will take care of you, and won't in any way challenge you.
p. 203 I mean that's probably ultimately why novels and movies have it over short stories, as on art form. Is that if the heart of the short story is dishonest, there aren't enough of the little flashes to keep you going. Whereas in a novel or a movie, even if the central project doesn't work, there are often ten or fifteen great, great, great things.
p. 266 [On his landscape (outside Bloomington), the long fields] When the wind blows, you can see ripples, it's like water. It's like the ocean, except it's really green. I mean, it really is. Not so much here. But you get another mile south, where it's nothing but serious full-time farmland and farmhouses? Sort of calm, real pretty.
p. 290 Today's person spends way more time in front of screens. In fluorescent-lit rooms, in cubicles, being on one end or the other of an electronic data transfer. And what is it to be human and alive and exercise you humanity in that kind of exchange? Versus fifty years ago, when the big thing was, I don't know that, havin' a house and a garden and driving ten miles to your light industrial job. And livin' and dyin' in the same town that you're in, and knowing what other towns looked like only from photographs and the occasional movie reel. I mean, there's just so much that seems different, and the speed with which it gets different is just...
p. 291 I think the reason why people behave in an ugly manner is that it's really scary to be alive and to be human, and people are really really afraid.
p. 294 Nice to have your borders redefined, though, by physical contact with another person... I'm not just a set of anxieties and ambitions. I'm a person confined to a limited range, realize your head is only a half-foot-long space, etc. - David Lipsky on physical relations with your significant other
p. 307 It's good to want a child to do well, but it's bad to want that glory to reflect back on you.
Monday, July 20, 2015
Moby Dick by Herman Melville, r. July 2015
p. 14 Who ain't a slave? Tell me that.
p. 43 Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.
p. 58 Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.
p. 60 Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.
p. 121 Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
p. 123 Here goes for a snooze. Damn me, it's worth a fellow's while to be born into the world, if only to fall right asleep. And now that I think of it, that's about the first thing babies do, and that's a sort of queer, too. Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of 'em. But that's against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth.
p. 136 For we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included.
p. 148 In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant the masthead; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes, extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner - for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.
p. 163 Oh boys, don't be sentimental; it's bad for the digestion! Take a tonic, follow me!
p. 166 Well, well; belike the whole world's a ball, as you scholars have it; and so 'tis right to make one ballroom of it. Dance on, lads, you're young; I was once.
p. 216 After the ceremony was concluded upon the present occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case might be. I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest. I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.
p. 324 I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world.
p. 383 The sea had jeeringly kept [Pip's (after almost drowning alone)] finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
p. 396 But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, [Ahab] seemed to be newly attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.
p. 428 Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
p. 431 No fear; I like a good [vice]grip; I like to feel something in this slippery world that can hold, man.
p. 586 Ah, well, if my day is doomed, and I am doomed with my day, it is something greater than I which dooms me, so I accept my doom as a sign of the greatness which is more than I am. - D. H. Lawrence
p. 43 Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.
p. 58 Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.
p. 60 Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.
p. 121 Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
p. 123 Here goes for a snooze. Damn me, it's worth a fellow's while to be born into the world, if only to fall right asleep. And now that I think of it, that's about the first thing babies do, and that's a sort of queer, too. Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of 'em. But that's against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth.
p. 136 For we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included.
p. 148 In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant the masthead; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes, extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner - for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.
p. 163 Oh boys, don't be sentimental; it's bad for the digestion! Take a tonic, follow me!
p. 166 Well, well; belike the whole world's a ball, as you scholars have it; and so 'tis right to make one ballroom of it. Dance on, lads, you're young; I was once.
p. 216 After the ceremony was concluded upon the present occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case might be. I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest. I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.
p. 324 I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world.
p. 383 The sea had jeeringly kept [Pip's (after almost drowning alone)] finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
p. 396 But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, [Ahab] seemed to be newly attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.
p. 428 Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
p. 431 No fear; I like a good [vice]grip; I like to feel something in this slippery world that can hold, man.
p. 586 Ah, well, if my day is doomed, and I am doomed with my day, it is something greater than I which dooms me, so I accept my doom as a sign of the greatness which is more than I am. - D. H. Lawrence
Saturday, June 27, 2015
Of Hills and Dales - 2015 Commencement Address by Michael Ward, r. Jun. 2015
p. 5 And I think quite a lot of people find the years straight out of college to be some of the hardest in life. All the educational framework which you've used to hold yourself up, and which in large part you've defined yourself by, is taken away and you're like a climbing rose without a trellis. And you either lie on the ground and rot or allow yourself to be pruned and get turned into a rosebush which can stand its own integrity.
p. 5 Suffice it to say, from that point on things began to improve. By which I don't mean that I jumped straight out of the [post-graduation/what-to-do-with-my-life] trough and shot up the greasy pole of success again, nor that I just exchanged low spirits for high spirits. I began to realize that hills and dales are equally impostors - like Kipling's triumph and disaster. Success can't keep its promises and failure can't hold its ground. One shouldn't be bamboozled by either state. The important thing is not to be in a certain state, but to be a certain kind of person in whichever state you find yourself. Sure, I think one has a duty to do as much as one can to fulfill one's potential, to strive for success, certainly to do good and avoid evil, but the outcome of one's efforts is of secondary importance. To quote a certain wizard's advice to a Mr. Underhill (significant name) who was lamenting that he lived in dark days: "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." Or to paraphrase Mother Teresa: We are not called to be successful; we are called to be faithful.
p. 7 At graduation I thought I'd arrived. Having done all I was told I should accomplish by way of earning a good degree from a good school, I thought I could expect life to unfurl smoothly before me in a series of ever more pleasant and successful scenes. It took me quite a while to realize that this wasn't to be my lot, that this is the lot of nobody, and that life actually proceeds according to what C.S. Lewis calls the "law of undulation." G.K. Chesterton called it the rolling English road.
p. 5 Suffice it to say, from that point on things began to improve. By which I don't mean that I jumped straight out of the [post-graduation/what-to-do-with-my-life] trough and shot up the greasy pole of success again, nor that I just exchanged low spirits for high spirits. I began to realize that hills and dales are equally impostors - like Kipling's triumph and disaster. Success can't keep its promises and failure can't hold its ground. One shouldn't be bamboozled by either state. The important thing is not to be in a certain state, but to be a certain kind of person in whichever state you find yourself. Sure, I think one has a duty to do as much as one can to fulfill one's potential, to strive for success, certainly to do good and avoid evil, but the outcome of one's efforts is of secondary importance. To quote a certain wizard's advice to a Mr. Underhill (significant name) who was lamenting that he lived in dark days: "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." Or to paraphrase Mother Teresa: We are not called to be successful; we are called to be faithful.
p. 7 At graduation I thought I'd arrived. Having done all I was told I should accomplish by way of earning a good degree from a good school, I thought I could expect life to unfurl smoothly before me in a series of ever more pleasant and successful scenes. It took me quite a while to realize that this wasn't to be my lot, that this is the lot of nobody, and that life actually proceeds according to what C.S. Lewis calls the "law of undulation." G.K. Chesterton called it the rolling English road.
Monday, June 22, 2015
The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason, r. Jun. 2015
p. 14 As for study, did not our wise teacher teach us that learning was of two kinds: the one kind being the things we learned and knew, and the other being the training that taught us how to find out what we did not know?
p. 16 And when youth comes to age for advice he receives the wisdom of years. But too often does youth think that age knows only the wisdom of days gone, and therefor profits not. But remember this, the sun that shines today is the sun that shone when thy father was born, and will still be shining when thy last grandchild shall pass into the darkness.
p. 17 The thoughts of youth are bright lights that shine forth like the meteors that oft make brilliant the sky, but the wisdom of age is like the fixed stars that shine so unchanged that the sailor may depend upon them to steer his course.
p. 22 You have learned your lesson well. You first learned to live upon less than you could earn. Next you learned to seek advice from those who were competent through their own experiences to give it. And, lastly, you have learned to make gold work for you.
p. 24 When I set a task for myself, I complete it. Therefore, I am careful not to start difficult and impractical tasks, because I love leisure.
p. 26 A small return and a safe one is far more desirable than risk.
p. 26 Enjoy life while you are here. Do not overstrain or try to save too much. If one-tenth of all you earn is as much as you can comfortably keep, be content to keep this portion. Live otherwise according to your income and let not yourself get niggardly and afraid to spend. Life is good and life is rich with things worthwhile and things to enjoy.
p. 37 Which desirest thou the most? Is it the gratification of thy desires of each day, a jewel, a bit of finery, better raiment, more food; things quickly gone and forgotten? Or is it substantial belongings, gold, lands, herds, merchandise, income-bringing investments? The coins thou takest from thy purse bring the first. The coins thou leavest within it will bring the latter.
p. 46 Better by far to consult the wisdom of those experienced in handling money for profit. Such advice is freely given for the asking and may readily posses a value equal in gold to the sum thou considerest investing. In truth, such is its actual value if it save thee from loss.
p. 47 To a man's heart it bring gladness to eat the figs from his own trees and the grapes of his own vines. To own his own domicile and to have it a place he is proud to care for, putteth confidence in his heart and greater effort behind all his endeavors. Therefore, do I recommend that every man own the roof that sheltereth him and his.
p. 53 Preceding accomplishment must be desire. Thy desires must be strong and definite. General desires are but weak longings. For a man to wish to be rich is of little purpose. For a man to desire five pieces of gold is a tangible desire which he can press to fulfillment.
p. 97 Our wise acts accompany us through life to please us and to help us. Just as surely, our unwise acts follow us to plague and torment us.
p. 105 If you desire to help thy friend, do so in a way that will not bring thy friend's burdens upon thyself.
p. 113 I like not idle gold, even less I like too much of risk.
p. 116 Then be not swayed by foolish sentiments of obligation to trust thy treasure to any person. If thou wouldst help thy family or thy friends, find other ways than risking the loss of the treasure. Forget not that gold slippeth away in unexpected ways from those unskilled in guarding it. As well waste thy treasure in extravagance as let others lose it for thee.
p. 154 It was like having an adventure to make the change [to a cheaper lifestyle]. We enjoyed figuring this way and that, to live comfortably upon that remaining seventy percent.
p. 167 Some men hate [work]. They make it their enemy. Better to treat it like a friend, make thyself like it. Don't mind because it is hard. If thou thinkest about what a good house thou build, then who cares if the beams are heavy and it is far from the well to carry the water for the plaster…. Remember, work, well-done, does good to the man who does it. It makes him a better man.
p. 16 And when youth comes to age for advice he receives the wisdom of years. But too often does youth think that age knows only the wisdom of days gone, and therefor profits not. But remember this, the sun that shines today is the sun that shone when thy father was born, and will still be shining when thy last grandchild shall pass into the darkness.
p. 17 The thoughts of youth are bright lights that shine forth like the meteors that oft make brilliant the sky, but the wisdom of age is like the fixed stars that shine so unchanged that the sailor may depend upon them to steer his course.
p. 22 You have learned your lesson well. You first learned to live upon less than you could earn. Next you learned to seek advice from those who were competent through their own experiences to give it. And, lastly, you have learned to make gold work for you.
p. 24 When I set a task for myself, I complete it. Therefore, I am careful not to start difficult and impractical tasks, because I love leisure.
p. 26 A small return and a safe one is far more desirable than risk.
p. 26 Enjoy life while you are here. Do not overstrain or try to save too much. If one-tenth of all you earn is as much as you can comfortably keep, be content to keep this portion. Live otherwise according to your income and let not yourself get niggardly and afraid to spend. Life is good and life is rich with things worthwhile and things to enjoy.
p. 37 Which desirest thou the most? Is it the gratification of thy desires of each day, a jewel, a bit of finery, better raiment, more food; things quickly gone and forgotten? Or is it substantial belongings, gold, lands, herds, merchandise, income-bringing investments? The coins thou takest from thy purse bring the first. The coins thou leavest within it will bring the latter.
p. 46 Better by far to consult the wisdom of those experienced in handling money for profit. Such advice is freely given for the asking and may readily posses a value equal in gold to the sum thou considerest investing. In truth, such is its actual value if it save thee from loss.
p. 47 To a man's heart it bring gladness to eat the figs from his own trees and the grapes of his own vines. To own his own domicile and to have it a place he is proud to care for, putteth confidence in his heart and greater effort behind all his endeavors. Therefore, do I recommend that every man own the roof that sheltereth him and his.
p. 53 Preceding accomplishment must be desire. Thy desires must be strong and definite. General desires are but weak longings. For a man to wish to be rich is of little purpose. For a man to desire five pieces of gold is a tangible desire which he can press to fulfillment.
p. 97 Our wise acts accompany us through life to please us and to help us. Just as surely, our unwise acts follow us to plague and torment us.
p. 105 If you desire to help thy friend, do so in a way that will not bring thy friend's burdens upon thyself.
p. 113 I like not idle gold, even less I like too much of risk.
p. 116 Then be not swayed by foolish sentiments of obligation to trust thy treasure to any person. If thou wouldst help thy family or thy friends, find other ways than risking the loss of the treasure. Forget not that gold slippeth away in unexpected ways from those unskilled in guarding it. As well waste thy treasure in extravagance as let others lose it for thee.
p. 154 It was like having an adventure to make the change [to a cheaper lifestyle]. We enjoyed figuring this way and that, to live comfortably upon that remaining seventy percent.
p. 167 Some men hate [work]. They make it their enemy. Better to treat it like a friend, make thyself like it. Don't mind because it is hard. If thou thinkest about what a good house thou build, then who cares if the beams are heavy and it is far from the well to carry the water for the plaster…. Remember, work, well-done, does good to the man who does it. It makes him a better man.
Saturday, May 16, 2015
The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, r. May 2015
p. 17 Time is relative, said Heraclitus a long time ago, and distance a function of velocity. Since the ultimate goal of transport technology is the annihilation of space, the compression of all Being into one pure point, it follows that six-packs [of beer] help.
p. 35 He had gazed upon this scene a hundred times in his life so far; he knew that he might have only a hundred more.
p. 40 The brightest thing in Abbzug's dome was a brain. She was too wise to linger long with any fad, though she tested them all. With an intelligence too fine to be violated by ideas, she had learned that she was searching not for self-transformation (she liked herself) but for something good to do.
p. 60 "The wilderness once offered men a plausible way of life," the doctor said. "Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge. Soon there will be no wilderness."
p. 62 Far beyond those galloping galaxies, or perhaps all too present to be seen, lurked God. The gaseous vertebrate.
p. 63 Tho entertainment palled. Fatigue like gravitation pulled at limbs and eyelids. As they had come so they departed, first Abbzug, then the two women from San Diego. The ladies first. Not because they were the weaker sex - they were not - but simply because they had more sense. Men on an outing feel obliged to stay up drinking to the vile and bilious end, jabbering, mumbling and maundering through the blear, to end up finally on hands and knees, puking on innocent sand, befouling God's sweet earth. The manly tradition.
p. 65 The river in its measureless sublimity rolled softly by, whispering of time. Which heals, they say, all. But does it? The stars looked kindly down. A lie. A wind in the willows suggested sleep. And nightmares. Smith pushed more drift pine into the fire, and a scorpion, dormant in a crack deep in the wood, was horribly awakened, too late. No one noticed the mute agony. Deep in the solemn canyon, under the fiery stars, peace reigned generally.
p. 154 "You're a verbal cripple. You use obscenities as a crutch. Obscenity is a crutch for crippled minds."
p. 237 While outside in the fields of desert summer the melons ripened at their leisure in the nest of their vines, and a restless rooster, perched on the roof of the hencoop, fired his premature ejaculation at the waning moon, and in the pasture the horses lifted noble Roman heads to stare in the night at something humans cannot see.
p. 336 What do we really know? … The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foreknowledge of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement. I challenge that statement. With what? I don't know.
p. 35 He had gazed upon this scene a hundred times in his life so far; he knew that he might have only a hundred more.
p. 40 The brightest thing in Abbzug's dome was a brain. She was too wise to linger long with any fad, though she tested them all. With an intelligence too fine to be violated by ideas, she had learned that she was searching not for self-transformation (she liked herself) but for something good to do.
p. 60 "The wilderness once offered men a plausible way of life," the doctor said. "Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge. Soon there will be no wilderness."
p. 62 Far beyond those galloping galaxies, or perhaps all too present to be seen, lurked God. The gaseous vertebrate.
p. 63 Tho entertainment palled. Fatigue like gravitation pulled at limbs and eyelids. As they had come so they departed, first Abbzug, then the two women from San Diego. The ladies first. Not because they were the weaker sex - they were not - but simply because they had more sense. Men on an outing feel obliged to stay up drinking to the vile and bilious end, jabbering, mumbling and maundering through the blear, to end up finally on hands and knees, puking on innocent sand, befouling God's sweet earth. The manly tradition.
p. 65 The river in its measureless sublimity rolled softly by, whispering of time. Which heals, they say, all. But does it? The stars looked kindly down. A lie. A wind in the willows suggested sleep. And nightmares. Smith pushed more drift pine into the fire, and a scorpion, dormant in a crack deep in the wood, was horribly awakened, too late. No one noticed the mute agony. Deep in the solemn canyon, under the fiery stars, peace reigned generally.
p. 154 "You're a verbal cripple. You use obscenities as a crutch. Obscenity is a crutch for crippled minds."
p. 237 While outside in the fields of desert summer the melons ripened at their leisure in the nest of their vines, and a restless rooster, perched on the roof of the hencoop, fired his premature ejaculation at the waning moon, and in the pasture the horses lifted noble Roman heads to stare in the night at something humans cannot see.
p. 336 What do we really know? … The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foreknowledge of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement. I challenge that statement. With what? I don't know.
Friday, May 1, 2015
The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, r. Apr. 2015
p. 1 Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.
p. 11 History and societies do not crawl. They makes jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Ye we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental progression.
p. 48 Let me insist that erudition is important to me. It signals genuine intellectual curiosity. It accompanies an open mind and the desire to probe the ideas of others. Above all, an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the simplifications of the five-minute manager, or the philistinism of the overspecialized scholar.
p. 94 A school allows someone with unusual ideas with the remote possibility of a payoff to find company and create a microcosm insulated from others. The members of the group can be ostracized together - which is better than being ostracized alone. If you engage in a Black Swan-dependent activity, it is better to be part of a group.
p. 119 My being here is a consequential low-probability occurrence, and I tend to forget it.
p. 133 I propose that if you want a simple step to a higher form of life, as distant as you can get, then you may have to denarrate, that is, shut down the television set, minimize time spent reading newspapers, ignore the blogs…. This insulation from the toxicity of the world will have an additional benefit: it will improve your well-being. Also, bear in mind how shallow we are with probability, the mother of all abstract notions. You do not have to do much more in order to gain a deeper understanding of things around you. Above all, learn to avoid tunneling.
p. 144 Remember that we treat ideas like possessions, and it will be hard for us to process them.
p. 187 Always remember that "R-square" is unfit for Extremistan; it is only good for academic promotion.
p. 193 …the relationship between the past and the future does not learn from the relationship between the past and the past previous to it. There is a blind spot: when we think of tomorrow we do not frame it in terms of what we thought about yesterday on the day before yesterday. Because of this introspective defect we fail to learn about the difference between our past predictions and the subsequent outcomes. When we think of tomorrow, we project it as another yesterday.
p. 194 …an element in the mechanics of how the human mind learns from the past makes us believe in definitive solutions - yet not consider that those who preceded us thought that they too had definitive solutions. We laugh at others and we don't realize that someone will be just as justified in laughing at us on some not too remote day.
p. 198 History is useful for the thrill of knowing the past, and for the narrative (indeed), provided it remains a harmless narrative. One should learn under severe caution. History is certainly not a place to theorize or derive general knowledge, nor is it meant to help with the future, without some caution…. The empirical doctor's approach to the problem of induction was to know history without theorizing from it. Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do not try to reverse engineer too much - but if you do, do not make big scientific claims. Remember that the empirical skeptics had respect for custom: they used it as a default, a basis for action, but not for more than that.
p. 210 Indeed, the notion of asymmetric outcomes is the central idea of this book: I will never get to know the unknown since, by definition, it is unknown. However, I can always guess how it might affect me, and I should base my decision around that.
p. 211 This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can't know) is the central idea of uncertainty.
p. 217 Note that scholars are judged mostly on how many times their work is referenced in other people's work, and thus cliques of people who quote one another are formed (it's an "I quote you, you quote me" type of business).
p. 227 But I find the emphasis on economic inequality, at the expense of other types of inequality, extremely bothersome. Fairness is not exclusively an economic matter; it becomes less and less so when we are satisfying our basic material needs. It is pecking order that matters! The superstars will always be there…. The disproportionate share of the very few in intellectual influence is even more unsettling than the unequal distribution of wealth - unsettling because, unlike the income gap, no social policy can eliminate it.
p. 241 I always remember my father's injunction that in medio stat virtus, "virtue lies in moderation."
p. 255 My erudite and polymathic father liked the company of extremely cultured Jesuit priests. I remember these Jesuit visitors occupying my chair at the dining table. I recall that one had a medical degree and a PhD in physics, yet taught Aramaic to locals in Beirut's Institute of Eastern Languages. His previous assignment could have been teaching high school physics, and the one before that was perhaps in the medical school. This kind of erudition impressed my father far more than scientific assembly-line work.
p. 256 The scientific association with a big idea, the "brand name," goes to the one who connects the dots, not the one who makes a casual observation…. In the end it is those who derive consequences and seize the importance of the ideas, seeing their real value, who win the day. They are the ones who can talk about the subject.
p. 268 What I am talking about is opacity, incompleteness of information, the invisibility of the generator of the world. History does not reveal its mind to us - we need to guess what's inside of it.
p. 289 Philosophers like to practice philosophical thinking on me-too subjects that other philosophers like to call philosophy, and they leave their minds at the door when they are outside these subjects.
p. 290 A scholar should not be a library's tool for making another library, as in the joke by Daniel Dennett.
p. 296 I worry far more about the "promising" stock market, particularly the "safe" blue chip stocks, than I do about speculative ventures - the former present invisible risks, the latter offer no surprises since you know how volatile they are and can limit your downside by investing smaller amounts.
p. 297 Snub your destiny. I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem a very small piece of advice, but it registered. In refusing to run to catch trains, I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics in behaviour, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking. You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.
p. 297 I am sometimes taken aback by how people can have a miserable day or get angry because they feel cheated by a bad meal, cold coffee, a social rebuff, or a rude reception…. We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportion…. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth - remember you are a Black Swan.
p. 300 After a long but soothing lachrymal episode, Yevgenia thought of the characters in the rainy novel of Georges Simenon and Graham Greene. They lived in a state of numbing and secure mediocrity. Second-rateness had charm, Yevgenia thought, and she had always preferred charm over beauty.
p. 307 …almost all academic papers are made to bore, impress, provide credibility, intimidate even, be presented at meetings, but not to be read except by suckers (or detractors) or, even worse, graduate students.
p. 312 First, Mother Nature likes redundancies, three different types of redundancies. The first, the simplest to understand, is defensive redundancy, the insurance type of redundancy that allows you to survive under adversity, thanks to the availability of spare parts. Look at the human body. We have two eyes, two lungs, two kidneys, even two brains (with the possible exception of corporate executives) - and each has more capacity than needed in ordinary circumstances. So redundancy equals insurance, and the apparent inefficiencies are associated with the costs of maintaining these spare parts and the energy needed to keep them around in spite of their idleness. The exact opposite of redundancy is naïve optimization.
p. 313 Felix qui nihil debet goes the Roman proverb: "Happy is he who owes nothing." Grandmothers who survived the Great Depression would have advised the exact opposite of debt: redundancy; they would urge us to have several years of income in cash before taking any personal risk - exactly my barbell idea of Chapter 11, in which one keeps high cash reserves while taking more aggressive risks but with a small portion of the portfolio.
p. 316 To those who say "We have no proof we are harming nature," a sound response is "We have no proof that we are not harming nature, either,"; the burden of proof is not on the ecological conservationist, but on someone disrupting an old system. Furthermore we should not "try to correct" the harm done, as we may be creating another problem we do not know much about currently.
p. 319 This makes me reflect on the foolishness of thinking that books are there to be read and could be replaced by electronic files. Think of the spate of functional redundancies provided by books. You cannot impress your neighbors with electronic files. You cannot prop up your ego with electronic files. Objects seem to have invisible but significant auxiliary functions that we are not aware of consciously, but that allow them to thrive…
p. 319 …people like to go to a precise destination, rather than face some degree of uncertainty, even if beneficial.
p. 323 One useful trick, I discovered, is to avoid listening to the question of the interviewer, and answer with whatever I have been thinking about recently. Remarkably, neither the interviewers nor the public notices the absence of correlation between question and answer.
p. 326
p. 328 I lack what the biologist Robert Sapolsky calls the beneficial aspect of acute stress, compared to the deleterious one of dull stress - another barbell, for no stress plus a little bit of extreme stress is vastly better than a little bit of stress (like mortgage worries) all the time.
p. 330 So The Black Swan is about human error in some domains, swelled by a long tradition of scientism and a plethora of information that fuels confidence without increasing knowledge. It covers the expert problem - harm caused by reliance on scientific-looking charlatans, with or without equations, or regular noncharlatanic scientists with a bit more confidence about their methods than the evidence warrants. The focus is on not being the turkey in places where it matters, though there is nothing wrong in being a fool where that has no effect.
p. 333 Indeed, the intelligent, curious, and open-minded amateur is my friend. A pleasant surprise for me was to discover that the sophisticated amateur who uses books for his own edification, and the journalist, could understand my ideas much better than professionals. Professional readers, less genuine, either read too quickly or have an agenda.
p. 334 …many readers (say, those who work in forecasting or banking) do not understand that the "actionable step" for them is simply to quit their profession and do something more ethical.
p. 334 …as almost all business books can be reduced to a few pages without any loss of their message and essence; novels and philosophical treatments cannot be compressed.
p. 334 …evolution does not work by teaching, but destroying.
p. 336 For I had undergone a difficult psychological moment, after the publication of The Black Swan, what the French call traversée du désert, when you go through the demoralizing desiccation and disorientation of crossing a desert in search of an unknown destination, or a more or less promised land. I had a rough time, shouting "Fire! Fire! Fire!" about the hidden risks in the system, and hearing people ignoring the content and instead just criticizing the presentation, as if they were saying "your diction in shouting 'Fire!' is bad." For example, the curator of a conference known as TED (a monstrosity that turns scientists and thinkers into low-level entertainers, like circus performers) complained that my presentation style did not conform to his taste in slickness…
p. 338 When you walk the walk, whether successful or not, you feel more indifferent and robust to people's opinion, freer, more real.
p. 361 It is much more sound to take risks you can measure than to measure the risks you are taking.
p. 362 David's comments also inspired me to focus more on iatrogenics, harm caused by the need to use quantitative models.
p. 368 How do you live long? By avoiding death. Yet people do not realize that success consists mainly in avoiding losses, not in trying to derive profits.
p. 368 Science, particularly its academic version, has never liked negative results, let alone the statement and advertising of its own limits. The reward system is not set up for it. You get respect for doing funambulism or spectator sports - following the right steps to become "the Einstein of Economics" or "the next Darwin" rather than give society something real by debunking myths or by cataloguing where our knowledge stops.
p. 371 Remember that the burden of proof lies on someone disturbing a complex system, not on the person protecting the status quo.
p. 371 Redundancy (in terms of having savings and cash under the mattress) is the opposite of debt. Psychologists tell us that getting rich does not bring happiness - if you spend your savings. But if you hide it under the mattress, you are less vulnerable to a Black Swan.
p. 371 Overspecialization is not a great idea. Consider what can happen to you if your job disappears completely. Someone who is a Wall Street analyst moonlighting as a bellydancer will do a lot better in a financial crisis than someone who is just an analyst.
p. 377 This is my Plan B. I kept looking at the position of my own grave. A Black Swan cannot so easily destroy a man who has an idea of his final destination. I felt robust.
p. 378
p. 11 History and societies do not crawl. They makes jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Ye we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental progression.
p. 48 Let me insist that erudition is important to me. It signals genuine intellectual curiosity. It accompanies an open mind and the desire to probe the ideas of others. Above all, an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the simplifications of the five-minute manager, or the philistinism of the overspecialized scholar.
p. 94 A school allows someone with unusual ideas with the remote possibility of a payoff to find company and create a microcosm insulated from others. The members of the group can be ostracized together - which is better than being ostracized alone. If you engage in a Black Swan-dependent activity, it is better to be part of a group.
p. 119 My being here is a consequential low-probability occurrence, and I tend to forget it.
p. 133 I propose that if you want a simple step to a higher form of life, as distant as you can get, then you may have to denarrate, that is, shut down the television set, minimize time spent reading newspapers, ignore the blogs…. This insulation from the toxicity of the world will have an additional benefit: it will improve your well-being. Also, bear in mind how shallow we are with probability, the mother of all abstract notions. You do not have to do much more in order to gain a deeper understanding of things around you. Above all, learn to avoid tunneling.
p. 144 Remember that we treat ideas like possessions, and it will be hard for us to process them.
p. 187 Always remember that "R-square" is unfit for Extremistan; it is only good for academic promotion.
p. 193 …the relationship between the past and the future does not learn from the relationship between the past and the past previous to it. There is a blind spot: when we think of tomorrow we do not frame it in terms of what we thought about yesterday on the day before yesterday. Because of this introspective defect we fail to learn about the difference between our past predictions and the subsequent outcomes. When we think of tomorrow, we project it as another yesterday.
p. 194 …an element in the mechanics of how the human mind learns from the past makes us believe in definitive solutions - yet not consider that those who preceded us thought that they too had definitive solutions. We laugh at others and we don't realize that someone will be just as justified in laughing at us on some not too remote day.
p. 198 History is useful for the thrill of knowing the past, and for the narrative (indeed), provided it remains a harmless narrative. One should learn under severe caution. History is certainly not a place to theorize or derive general knowledge, nor is it meant to help with the future, without some caution…. The empirical doctor's approach to the problem of induction was to know history without theorizing from it. Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do not try to reverse engineer too much - but if you do, do not make big scientific claims. Remember that the empirical skeptics had respect for custom: they used it as a default, a basis for action, but not for more than that.
p. 210 Indeed, the notion of asymmetric outcomes is the central idea of this book: I will never get to know the unknown since, by definition, it is unknown. However, I can always guess how it might affect me, and I should base my decision around that.
p. 211 This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can't know) is the central idea of uncertainty.
p. 217 Note that scholars are judged mostly on how many times their work is referenced in other people's work, and thus cliques of people who quote one another are formed (it's an "I quote you, you quote me" type of business).
p. 227 But I find the emphasis on economic inequality, at the expense of other types of inequality, extremely bothersome. Fairness is not exclusively an economic matter; it becomes less and less so when we are satisfying our basic material needs. It is pecking order that matters! The superstars will always be there…. The disproportionate share of the very few in intellectual influence is even more unsettling than the unequal distribution of wealth - unsettling because, unlike the income gap, no social policy can eliminate it.
p. 241 I always remember my father's injunction that in medio stat virtus, "virtue lies in moderation."
p. 255 My erudite and polymathic father liked the company of extremely cultured Jesuit priests. I remember these Jesuit visitors occupying my chair at the dining table. I recall that one had a medical degree and a PhD in physics, yet taught Aramaic to locals in Beirut's Institute of Eastern Languages. His previous assignment could have been teaching high school physics, and the one before that was perhaps in the medical school. This kind of erudition impressed my father far more than scientific assembly-line work.
p. 256 The scientific association with a big idea, the "brand name," goes to the one who connects the dots, not the one who makes a casual observation…. In the end it is those who derive consequences and seize the importance of the ideas, seeing their real value, who win the day. They are the ones who can talk about the subject.
p. 268 What I am talking about is opacity, incompleteness of information, the invisibility of the generator of the world. History does not reveal its mind to us - we need to guess what's inside of it.
p. 289 Philosophers like to practice philosophical thinking on me-too subjects that other philosophers like to call philosophy, and they leave their minds at the door when they are outside these subjects.
p. 290 A scholar should not be a library's tool for making another library, as in the joke by Daniel Dennett.
p. 296 I worry far more about the "promising" stock market, particularly the "safe" blue chip stocks, than I do about speculative ventures - the former present invisible risks, the latter offer no surprises since you know how volatile they are and can limit your downside by investing smaller amounts.
p. 297 Snub your destiny. I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem a very small piece of advice, but it registered. In refusing to run to catch trains, I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics in behaviour, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking. You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.
p. 297 I am sometimes taken aback by how people can have a miserable day or get angry because they feel cheated by a bad meal, cold coffee, a social rebuff, or a rude reception…. We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportion…. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth - remember you are a Black Swan.
p. 300 After a long but soothing lachrymal episode, Yevgenia thought of the characters in the rainy novel of Georges Simenon and Graham Greene. They lived in a state of numbing and secure mediocrity. Second-rateness had charm, Yevgenia thought, and she had always preferred charm over beauty.
p. 307 …almost all academic papers are made to bore, impress, provide credibility, intimidate even, be presented at meetings, but not to be read except by suckers (or detractors) or, even worse, graduate students.
p. 312 First, Mother Nature likes redundancies, three different types of redundancies. The first, the simplest to understand, is defensive redundancy, the insurance type of redundancy that allows you to survive under adversity, thanks to the availability of spare parts. Look at the human body. We have two eyes, two lungs, two kidneys, even two brains (with the possible exception of corporate executives) - and each has more capacity than needed in ordinary circumstances. So redundancy equals insurance, and the apparent inefficiencies are associated with the costs of maintaining these spare parts and the energy needed to keep them around in spite of their idleness. The exact opposite of redundancy is naïve optimization.
p. 313 Felix qui nihil debet goes the Roman proverb: "Happy is he who owes nothing." Grandmothers who survived the Great Depression would have advised the exact opposite of debt: redundancy; they would urge us to have several years of income in cash before taking any personal risk - exactly my barbell idea of Chapter 11, in which one keeps high cash reserves while taking more aggressive risks but with a small portion of the portfolio.
p. 316 To those who say "We have no proof we are harming nature," a sound response is "We have no proof that we are not harming nature, either,"; the burden of proof is not on the ecological conservationist, but on someone disrupting an old system. Furthermore we should not "try to correct" the harm done, as we may be creating another problem we do not know much about currently.
p. 319 This makes me reflect on the foolishness of thinking that books are there to be read and could be replaced by electronic files. Think of the spate of functional redundancies provided by books. You cannot impress your neighbors with electronic files. You cannot prop up your ego with electronic files. Objects seem to have invisible but significant auxiliary functions that we are not aware of consciously, but that allow them to thrive…
p. 319 …people like to go to a precise destination, rather than face some degree of uncertainty, even if beneficial.
p. 323 One useful trick, I discovered, is to avoid listening to the question of the interviewer, and answer with whatever I have been thinking about recently. Remarkably, neither the interviewers nor the public notices the absence of correlation between question and answer.
p. 326
p. 328 I lack what the biologist Robert Sapolsky calls the beneficial aspect of acute stress, compared to the deleterious one of dull stress - another barbell, for no stress plus a little bit of extreme stress is vastly better than a little bit of stress (like mortgage worries) all the time.
p. 330 So The Black Swan is about human error in some domains, swelled by a long tradition of scientism and a plethora of information that fuels confidence without increasing knowledge. It covers the expert problem - harm caused by reliance on scientific-looking charlatans, with or without equations, or regular noncharlatanic scientists with a bit more confidence about their methods than the evidence warrants. The focus is on not being the turkey in places where it matters, though there is nothing wrong in being a fool where that has no effect.
p. 333 Indeed, the intelligent, curious, and open-minded amateur is my friend. A pleasant surprise for me was to discover that the sophisticated amateur who uses books for his own edification, and the journalist, could understand my ideas much better than professionals. Professional readers, less genuine, either read too quickly or have an agenda.
p. 334 …many readers (say, those who work in forecasting or banking) do not understand that the "actionable step" for them is simply to quit their profession and do something more ethical.
p. 334 …as almost all business books can be reduced to a few pages without any loss of their message and essence; novels and philosophical treatments cannot be compressed.
p. 334 …evolution does not work by teaching, but destroying.
p. 336 For I had undergone a difficult psychological moment, after the publication of The Black Swan, what the French call traversée du désert, when you go through the demoralizing desiccation and disorientation of crossing a desert in search of an unknown destination, or a more or less promised land. I had a rough time, shouting "Fire! Fire! Fire!" about the hidden risks in the system, and hearing people ignoring the content and instead just criticizing the presentation, as if they were saying "your diction in shouting 'Fire!' is bad." For example, the curator of a conference known as TED (a monstrosity that turns scientists and thinkers into low-level entertainers, like circus performers) complained that my presentation style did not conform to his taste in slickness…
p. 338 When you walk the walk, whether successful or not, you feel more indifferent and robust to people's opinion, freer, more real.
p. 361 It is much more sound to take risks you can measure than to measure the risks you are taking.
p. 362 David's comments also inspired me to focus more on iatrogenics, harm caused by the need to use quantitative models.
p. 368 How do you live long? By avoiding death. Yet people do not realize that success consists mainly in avoiding losses, not in trying to derive profits.
p. 368 Science, particularly its academic version, has never liked negative results, let alone the statement and advertising of its own limits. The reward system is not set up for it. You get respect for doing funambulism or spectator sports - following the right steps to become "the Einstein of Economics" or "the next Darwin" rather than give society something real by debunking myths or by cataloguing where our knowledge stops.
p. 371 Remember that the burden of proof lies on someone disturbing a complex system, not on the person protecting the status quo.
p. 371 Redundancy (in terms of having savings and cash under the mattress) is the opposite of debt. Psychologists tell us that getting rich does not bring happiness - if you spend your savings. But if you hide it under the mattress, you are less vulnerable to a Black Swan.
p. 371 Overspecialization is not a great idea. Consider what can happen to you if your job disappears completely. Someone who is a Wall Street analyst moonlighting as a bellydancer will do a lot better in a financial crisis than someone who is just an analyst.
p. 377 This is my Plan B. I kept looking at the position of my own grave. A Black Swan cannot so easily destroy a man who has an idea of his final destination. I felt robust.
p. 378
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, r. Apr. 2015
p. 36 What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end:
p. 71 When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.
p. 81 To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil—everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost.
p. 122 "Not a minister," he said, "but I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you're in a forest and everything's really quiet, except there's still this sound you can't hear."
p. 158 ...it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up certain others.
p. 184 Everything was too ordinary. A quiet sunny day, and the field was not the field I remembered. I pictured Kiowa's face, the way he used to smile, but all I felt was the awkwardness of remembering.
p. 184 There were birds and butterflies, the soft rustlings of rural-anywhere.
p. 230 The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.
p. 246 I'm young and happy. I'll never die. I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is a Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.
p. 71 When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.
p. 81 To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil—everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost.
p. 122 "Not a minister," he said, "but I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you're in a forest and everything's really quiet, except there's still this sound you can't hear."
p. 158 ...it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up certain others.
p. 184 Everything was too ordinary. A quiet sunny day, and the field was not the field I remembered. I pictured Kiowa's face, the way he used to smile, but all I felt was the awkwardness of remembering.
p. 184 There were birds and butterflies, the soft rustlings of rural-anywhere.
p. 230 The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.
p. 246 I'm young and happy. I'll never die. I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is a Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.
Thursday, April 16, 2015
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, r. Apr. 2015
p. 28 Pozzo: I too would be happy to meet him. The more people I meet the happier I become. From the meanest creature one departs wiser, richer, more conscious of one's blessings.
p. 73 Vladimir: And where were we yesterday evening according to you? Estragon: How would I know? In another compartment. There's no lack of void.
p. 77 Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist? Vladimir: (impatiently). Yes yes, we're magicians.
p. 90 Vladimir: Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently.) Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed.
p. 103 Pozzo: …. They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.
p. 105. Vladimir: …. But habit is a great deadener.
p. 73 Vladimir: And where were we yesterday evening according to you? Estragon: How would I know? In another compartment. There's no lack of void.
p. 77 Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist? Vladimir: (impatiently). Yes yes, we're magicians.
p. 90 Vladimir: Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently.) Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed.
p. 103 Pozzo: …. They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.
p. 105. Vladimir: …. But habit is a great deadener.
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
O Vendedor de Sonhos: O Chamado por Augusto Cury, l. abr. 2015
p. 96 “— Show? Cada dia é um show, cada dia um espetáculo. Só não o descobre quem está mortalmente ferido pelo tédio. O drama e a comédia estão em nosso cérebro. Basta despertá-los.”
Sunday, March 29, 2015
The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, r. Mar. 2015
p. 25 We want him to be in the maximum uncertainty, so that his mind will be filled with contradictory pictures of the future, every one of which arouses hope or fear. There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.
p. 50 All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary. The real question is how to prepare for the Enemy's counterattack.
p. 67 …active habits are strengthened be repitition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.
p. 71 The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents - or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able te recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things.
p. 94 The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not anther self…. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same…. He aims at a contradiction. Things are to be many, yet somehow also one. The good of one self is to be the good of another. This impossibility he calls love, and this monotonous panacea can be detected under all He does and even all He is - or claims to be.
p. 101 If we could only find out what He is really up to! Hypothesis after hypothesis has been tried, and still we can't find out. Yet we must never lose hope; more and more complicated theories, fuller and fuller collections of data, richer rewards for researchers who make progress, more and more terrible punishments for those who fail - all this, pursued and accelerated to the very end of time, cannot, surely, fail to succeed.
p. 112 You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption 'My time is my own'. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours…. The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as chattels.
p. 113 Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they 'own' thieir bodies - those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds…
p. 133 I am not in the least interested in knowing how many people in England have been killed by bombs. In what state of mind they died, I can learn from the office at this end. That they were going to die sometime, I knew already.
p. 139 We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain - not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
p. 150 …the Enemy does not foresee the humans making their free contributions in a future, but sees them doing so in His unbounded Now. And obviously to watch a man doing somenthing is not to make him do it.
p. 151 To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge - to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour - this would be rejected as unutterably single-minded.
p. 169 Your patient, properly handled, will have no difficulty in regarding his emotion at the sight of human entrails as a revelation of Reality and his emotion at the sight of happy children or fair weather as mere sentiment.
p. 203 The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic'. These differences between the pupils - for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences - must be disguised.
p. 50 All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary. The real question is how to prepare for the Enemy's counterattack.
p. 67 …active habits are strengthened be repitition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.
p. 71 The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents - or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able te recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things.
p. 94 The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not anther self…. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same…. He aims at a contradiction. Things are to be many, yet somehow also one. The good of one self is to be the good of another. This impossibility he calls love, and this monotonous panacea can be detected under all He does and even all He is - or claims to be.
p. 101 If we could only find out what He is really up to! Hypothesis after hypothesis has been tried, and still we can't find out. Yet we must never lose hope; more and more complicated theories, fuller and fuller collections of data, richer rewards for researchers who make progress, more and more terrible punishments for those who fail - all this, pursued and accelerated to the very end of time, cannot, surely, fail to succeed.
p. 112 You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption 'My time is my own'. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours…. The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as chattels.
p. 113 Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they 'own' thieir bodies - those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds…
p. 133 I am not in the least interested in knowing how many people in England have been killed by bombs. In what state of mind they died, I can learn from the office at this end. That they were going to die sometime, I knew already.
p. 139 We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain - not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
p. 150 …the Enemy does not foresee the humans making their free contributions in a future, but sees them doing so in His unbounded Now. And obviously to watch a man doing somenthing is not to make him do it.
p. 151 To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge - to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour - this would be rejected as unutterably single-minded.
p. 169 Your patient, properly handled, will have no difficulty in regarding his emotion at the sight of human entrails as a revelation of Reality and his emotion at the sight of happy children or fair weather as mere sentiment.
p. 203 The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic'. These differences between the pupils - for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences - must be disguised.
Thursday, March 26, 2015
The Great Beanie Baby Bubble by Zac Bissonnette, r. Mar. 2015
p. 99 "There is nothing so disturbing to one's well-being and judgment as to see a friend get rich." -Charles Kindleberger
p. 133 "What is sought with difficulty is discovered with more pleasure." -St. Augustine
p. 133 "What is sought with difficulty is discovered with more pleasure." -St. Augustine
Monday, March 2, 2015
Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl, r. Mar. 2015
p. xvi The Kon-Tiki expedition opened my eyes to what the ocean really is. It is a conveyer and not an isolator. The ocean has been man's highway from the days he built the first buoyant ships, long before he tamed the horse, invented wheels, and cut roads through the virgin jungles.
p. 9 Once in a while you find yourself in an odd situation. You get into it by degrees and in the most natural way but, when you are right in the midst of it, you are suddenly astonished and ask yourself how in the world it all came about.
p. 22 Modern research demands that every branch shall dig its own hole. It's not usual for anyone to sort out what comes up out of the holes and try to put it all together.
p. 132 The world was simple - stars in the darkness. Whether it was 1947 B.C. or A.D. suddenly became of no significance. We lived, and that we felt with alert intensity. We realized that life had been full for men before the technical age also - in fact, fuller and richer in many ways than the life of modern man. Time and evolution somehow ceased to exist; all that was real and that mattered were the same today as they had always been and would always be. We were swallowed up in the absolute common measure of history - endless unbroken darkness under a swarm of stars.
p. 9 Once in a while you find yourself in an odd situation. You get into it by degrees and in the most natural way but, when you are right in the midst of it, you are suddenly astonished and ask yourself how in the world it all came about.
p. 22 Modern research demands that every branch shall dig its own hole. It's not usual for anyone to sort out what comes up out of the holes and try to put it all together.
p. 132 The world was simple - stars in the darkness. Whether it was 1947 B.C. or A.D. suddenly became of no significance. We lived, and that we felt with alert intensity. We realized that life had been full for men before the technical age also - in fact, fuller and richer in many ways than the life of modern man. Time and evolution somehow ceased to exist; all that was real and that mattered were the same today as they had always been and would always be. We were swallowed up in the absolute common measure of history - endless unbroken darkness under a swarm of stars.
Monday, February 2, 2015
The Acid House by Irvine Welsh, r. Feb. 2015
p. 23 They were pretty desperate times really, but home always looks better when you're away from it, and even more so through a haze of hash.
p. 65 Finding the appropriate entry in this most up-to-date but already well-worn copy of Halliwell's, Smith was tempted to highlight it now, prior to viewing the film. He resisted this impulse, reasoning that you had to actually watch the movie first. There were so many things that could happen to you. You could be disturbed by the phone or a knock at the door. The video could malfunction and chew up the tape. You could be struck down by a massive cardiac arrest. Such happenings were, he considered, equally unlikely for him, nonetheless he held to his superstition.
p. 84 There was always a tension in his mind and body; this was part and parcel of being a classical scholar in a world where the classics were undervalued. His depth and breadth of knowledge went unrecognized.
p. 65 Finding the appropriate entry in this most up-to-date but already well-worn copy of Halliwell's, Smith was tempted to highlight it now, prior to viewing the film. He resisted this impulse, reasoning that you had to actually watch the movie first. There were so many things that could happen to you. You could be disturbed by the phone or a knock at the door. The video could malfunction and chew up the tape. You could be struck down by a massive cardiac arrest. Such happenings were, he considered, equally unlikely for him, nonetheless he held to his superstition.
p. 84 There was always a tension in his mind and body; this was part and parcel of being a classical scholar in a world where the classics were undervalued. His depth and breadth of knowledge went unrecognized.
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman, r. Jan. 2015
p. 12 The Scots teach the world that one of the crucial ways we measure progress is by how far we have come from what we were before. The present judges the past, not the other way around.
p. 64 In every case, the goal of intellectual life was to understand in order to teach others, to enable the next generation to learn what you yourself have mastered and build on it.
p. 75 Shaftesbury also explained where the highest and most sophisticated polite cultures came from. The answer was simple: liberty. "All politeness is owing to Liberty," he wrote. "We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision."
p. 83 Hutcheson never worried about the dangers of letting people do or say whatever they wanted, because in his mind a free society enjoys a firm and permanent backstop, our innate moral sense, which enables us to distinguish the vicious from the virtuous, and the decent from the obscene, just as our intellectual reason enables us to sort out truth from falsehood.
p. 135 Jacobitism reflected a nostalgic yearning for a traditional social order in which everyone supposedly knew his or her preordained place and stayed in it. It satisfied a deep utopian longing for the perfect society - except that it looked backwards, rather than ahead, for its model of perfection.
p. 174 Hume planned for himself a house, coach-shed, and stables, and set to work finding a builder. "I am engaged in building a house," he wrote to a friend, "which is the second great operation of human life." The first, he explained, was marriage.
p. 206 Postmodern morality tells us constantly, "Don't be judgmental" - yet Adam Smith was saying that being judgmental is the essence of what makes us moral beings.
p. 212 ...capitalism brings an intellectual as well as an economic change. It alters the way we think about ourselves and about others: we become buyers and sellers, customers and suppliers, who strive to improve the quality and quantity of our output, in order to gratify our needs. Eventually, Smith states, the division of labor produces people who do nothing but think about improvements: engineers… scientists… and those whose trade it is not to do anything, but to observe everything" - philosophers, teachers, and professional managers of every sort.
p. 213 [Smith] conceded that capitalism generates a great inequality of wealth, with a very few commanding the great bulk of commodities and a great part of the rest sharing what is left. But even so, Smith wanted to know, "in what manner shall we account for the superior affluence and abundance commonly possessed by even the lowest and most despised member of Civilized Society, compared with what the most respected and active savage can attain to."
p. 213 Commentators sometimes suggest that irony is the most characteristic attitude of the modern mind.
p. 260 Federal versus state power, executive versus legislative, and judicial versus them both…. Gridlock at the public level guarantees liberty at the private level: this was the dirty little secret Madison dared to unveil in the Federalist Papers.
p. 265 [James Wilson] lived by Reid's maxim, "I despise philosophy and renounce its guidance; let my soul dwell in common sense." He always insisted that decisions be written in clear and straightforward language, avoiding any legal or technical jargon, so that any citizen could read and understand them.
p. 310 Virginia Woolf remarked of [Walter] Scott's novels, "part of their astonishing freshness, their perennial vitality, is that you may read them over and over again, and never know for certain what Scott himself was or what Scott himself thought."
p. 319 The lesson Scott taught the modern world was that the past does not have to die or vanish: it can live on, in a nation's memory, and help to nourish its posterity.
p. 335 "Telford's is a happy life: everywhere making roads, building bridges, forming canals, and creating harbors - works of sure, solid, permanent utility…"
p. 343 Scottish virtues presented as a "personal power" to match the new mechanized power unleashed by the Industrial Revolution. You can be who you want to be, so choose carefully and learn to live with the result.
p. 355 Dugald Stewart had repeatedly emphasized to students that how a government came into being… mattered less than what the government did when it got there. As long as it promoted progress and protected the rights of the individual and property; as long as it kept pace with social and economic change and expanded opportunities for everyone, then it was a good government, no matter who was in charge. If it did not then it was a failure, no matter how many people voted for it.
p. 378 …the new evangelism sought to provide a steadily improving inner spiritual life, to match the progress of society and "civilization." As the young David Livingstone discovered when he read the works of the Scottish astronomer and theologian Thomas Dick, science and religion were parallel paths to revealing God's truth. In other words, the thirst for knowledge of the world and the desire to be one with Jesus Christ were not at odds with each other.
p. 380 For all the risks he ran, Livingston enjoyed the strenuous effort his itinerant mission involved. "The mere animal pleasure of traveling in a wild unexplored country is very great," he wrote. "Great exercise imparts elasticity to the muscles, fresh and healthy blood circulates through the brain, the mind works well, the eye is clear, the step is firm."
p. 389 "Knowledge is of little use, then confined to mere speculation." [-Benjamin Rush]
p. 406 "The Republic may not give wealth or happiness; she has not promised these. It is the freedom to pursue these, not their realization, we can claim." [-Andrew Carnegie]
p. 410 Then Samuel Morse had sent his first telegraphic message from Baltimore to Washington in 1844, the words he chose came from the Bible: "What hath God wrought?" The words have since seemed prophetic, expressing the sense of astonishment, almost foreboding, at how the world would change over the next century and a half, thanks to technology and the industrial age.
p. 64 In every case, the goal of intellectual life was to understand in order to teach others, to enable the next generation to learn what you yourself have mastered and build on it.
p. 75 Shaftesbury also explained where the highest and most sophisticated polite cultures came from. The answer was simple: liberty. "All politeness is owing to Liberty," he wrote. "We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision."
p. 83 Hutcheson never worried about the dangers of letting people do or say whatever they wanted, because in his mind a free society enjoys a firm and permanent backstop, our innate moral sense, which enables us to distinguish the vicious from the virtuous, and the decent from the obscene, just as our intellectual reason enables us to sort out truth from falsehood.
p. 135 Jacobitism reflected a nostalgic yearning for a traditional social order in which everyone supposedly knew his or her preordained place and stayed in it. It satisfied a deep utopian longing for the perfect society - except that it looked backwards, rather than ahead, for its model of perfection.
p. 174 Hume planned for himself a house, coach-shed, and stables, and set to work finding a builder. "I am engaged in building a house," he wrote to a friend, "which is the second great operation of human life." The first, he explained, was marriage.
p. 206 Postmodern morality tells us constantly, "Don't be judgmental" - yet Adam Smith was saying that being judgmental is the essence of what makes us moral beings.
p. 212 ...capitalism brings an intellectual as well as an economic change. It alters the way we think about ourselves and about others: we become buyers and sellers, customers and suppliers, who strive to improve the quality and quantity of our output, in order to gratify our needs. Eventually, Smith states, the division of labor produces people who do nothing but think about improvements: engineers… scientists… and those whose trade it is not to do anything, but to observe everything" - philosophers, teachers, and professional managers of every sort.
p. 213 [Smith] conceded that capitalism generates a great inequality of wealth, with a very few commanding the great bulk of commodities and a great part of the rest sharing what is left. But even so, Smith wanted to know, "in what manner shall we account for the superior affluence and abundance commonly possessed by even the lowest and most despised member of Civilized Society, compared with what the most respected and active savage can attain to."
p. 213 Commentators sometimes suggest that irony is the most characteristic attitude of the modern mind.
p. 260 Federal versus state power, executive versus legislative, and judicial versus them both…. Gridlock at the public level guarantees liberty at the private level: this was the dirty little secret Madison dared to unveil in the Federalist Papers.
p. 265 [James Wilson] lived by Reid's maxim, "I despise philosophy and renounce its guidance; let my soul dwell in common sense." He always insisted that decisions be written in clear and straightforward language, avoiding any legal or technical jargon, so that any citizen could read and understand them.
p. 310 Virginia Woolf remarked of [Walter] Scott's novels, "part of their astonishing freshness, their perennial vitality, is that you may read them over and over again, and never know for certain what Scott himself was or what Scott himself thought."
p. 319 The lesson Scott taught the modern world was that the past does not have to die or vanish: it can live on, in a nation's memory, and help to nourish its posterity.
p. 335 "Telford's is a happy life: everywhere making roads, building bridges, forming canals, and creating harbors - works of sure, solid, permanent utility…"
p. 343 Scottish virtues presented as a "personal power" to match the new mechanized power unleashed by the Industrial Revolution. You can be who you want to be, so choose carefully and learn to live with the result.
p. 355 Dugald Stewart had repeatedly emphasized to students that how a government came into being… mattered less than what the government did when it got there. As long as it promoted progress and protected the rights of the individual and property; as long as it kept pace with social and economic change and expanded opportunities for everyone, then it was a good government, no matter who was in charge. If it did not then it was a failure, no matter how many people voted for it.
p. 378 …the new evangelism sought to provide a steadily improving inner spiritual life, to match the progress of society and "civilization." As the young David Livingstone discovered when he read the works of the Scottish astronomer and theologian Thomas Dick, science and religion were parallel paths to revealing God's truth. In other words, the thirst for knowledge of the world and the desire to be one with Jesus Christ were not at odds with each other.
p. 380 For all the risks he ran, Livingston enjoyed the strenuous effort his itinerant mission involved. "The mere animal pleasure of traveling in a wild unexplored country is very great," he wrote. "Great exercise imparts elasticity to the muscles, fresh and healthy blood circulates through the brain, the mind works well, the eye is clear, the step is firm."
p. 389 "Knowledge is of little use, then confined to mere speculation." [-Benjamin Rush]
p. 406 "The Republic may not give wealth or happiness; she has not promised these. It is the freedom to pursue these, not their realization, we can claim." [-Andrew Carnegie]
p. 410 Then Samuel Morse had sent his first telegraphic message from Baltimore to Washington in 1844, the words he chose came from the Bible: "What hath God wrought?" The words have since seemed prophetic, expressing the sense of astonishment, almost foreboding, at how the world would change over the next century and a half, thanks to technology and the industrial age.
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, r. Jan. 2014
That in the two kingdoms above mentioned, where, during his residence, he had conversed very much, he observed long life to be the universal desire and wish of mankind. That whoever had one foot in the grave was sure to hold back the other as strongly as he could. That the oldest had still hopes of living one day longer, and looked on death as the greatest evil, from which nature always prompted him to retreat. Only in this island of Luggnagg the appetite for living was not so eager, from the continual example of the STRULDBRUGS before their eyes.
"That the system of living contrived by me, was unreasonable and unjust; because it supposed a perpetuity of youth, health, and vigour, which no man could be so foolish to hope, however extravagant he may be in his wishes. That the question therefore was not, whether a man would choose to be always in the prime of youth, attended with prosperity and health; but how he would pass a perpetual life under all the usual disadvantages which old age brings along with it. For although few men will avow their desires of being immortal, upon such hard conditions, yet in the two kingdoms before mentioned, of Balnibarbi and Japan, he observed that every man desired to put off death some time longer, let it approach ever so late: and he rarely heard of any man who died willingly, except he were incited by the extremity of grief or torture. And he appealed to me, whether in those countries I had travelled, as well as my own, I had not observed the same general disposition."
After this preface, he gave me a particular account of the STRULDBRUGS among them. He said, "they commonly acted like mortals till about thirty years old; after which, by degrees, they grew melancholy and dejected, increasing in both till they came to fourscore. This he learned from their own confession: for otherwise, there not being above two or three of that species born in an age, they were too few to form a general observation by. When they came to fourscore years, which is reckoned the extremity of living in this country, they had not only all the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. They were not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection, which never descended below their grandchildren. Envy and impotent desires are their prevailing passions. But those objects against which their envy seems principally directed, are the vices of the younger sort and the deaths of the old. By reflecting on the former, they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure; and whenever they see a funeral, they lament and repine that others have gone to a harbour of rest to which they themselves never can hope to arrive. They have no remembrance of anything but what they learned and observed in their youth and middle-age, and even that is very imperfect; and for the truth or particulars of any fact, it is safer to depend on common tradition, than upon their best recollections. The least miserable among them appear to be those who turn to dotage, and entirely lose their memories; these meet with more pity and assistance, because they want many bad qualities which abound in others.
"If a STRULDBRUG happen to marry one of his own kind, the marriage is dissolved of course, by the courtesy of the kingdom, as soon as the younger of the two comes to be fourscore; for the law thinks it a reasonable indulgence, that those who are condemned, without any fault of their own, to a perpetual continuance in the world, should not have their misery doubled by the load of a wife.
"As soon as they have completed the term of eighty years, they are looked on as dead in law; their heirs immediately succeed to their estates; only a small pittance is reserved for their support; and the poor ones are maintained at the public charge. After that period, they are held incapable of any employment of trust or profit; they cannot purchase lands, or take leases; neither are they allowed to be witnesses in any cause, either civil or criminal, not even for the decision of meers and bounds.
"At ninety, they lose their teeth and hair; they have at that age no distinction of taste, but eat and drink whatever they can get, without relish or appetite. The diseases they were subject to still continue, without increasing or diminishing. In talking, they forget the common appellation of things, and the names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends and relations. For the same reason, they never can amuse themselves with reading, because their memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning of a sentence to the end; and by this defect, they are deprived of the only entertainment whereof they might otherwise be capable.
The language of this country being always upon the flux, the STRULDBRUGS of one age do not understand those of another; neither are they able, after two hundred years, to hold any conversation (farther than by a few general words) with their neighbours the mortals; and thus they lie under the disadvantage of living like foreigners in their own country."
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