...because if you don't love what you do, neither will anyone else.
But while passion isn't everything, it is crucial. Passion is a good indicator of where your efforts will be best spent.
The most successful YouTubers out there release content on a regular basis. Their viewers notice it. They come to expect it. And eventually, they come to depend on it.... The key here is to keep your brand on the minds of your audience. And from what we've seen, that's what's so powerful about social media.
Friday, December 9, 2016
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
Death Be Not Proud by John Gunther, r. Nov. 2015
p. 106 I said one evening that all I really wanted in life was one full day in which there should be absolutely nothing I had to do. Johnny: "Try jumping off the Empire State Building."
p. 140 All the doctors! - helpless flies now, climbing across the granite face of Death. Johnny died at 11:02pm. Frances reached for him through the ugly, transparent, raincoat curtain of the oxygen machine. I felt his arms, cupping my hands around them, and the warmth gradually left them, receding very slowly upward from his hands. For a long time some warmth remained. Then little the life-color left his face, his lips became blue, and his hands were cold. What is life? It departs covertly.
p. 142 We said goodbye. But to anybody who ever know him, he is still alive, I do not mean merely that he lives in both of us or in the trees at Deerfield or in anything he touched truly, but that the influence, the impact, of a heroic personality continues to exert itself long after mortal bonds are snapped. Johnny transmits permanently something of what he was, since the fabric of the universe is continuous and eternal.
p. 145 Knowing [Johnny] and thinking of his stubborn refusal to accept defeat makes me believe that that spirit will live on. For such there must be an immortality which we who tinker at the body may guess at but not understand.
p. 173 Wednesday: Self analysis: About half time my conscious mind is either asleep or wandering off in space. This... accounts for procrastination etc. I am greatly overintrovert - caused by over-consciousness of what others think of me. Caused by my atheism (?).
p. 191 Today, when I see parents impatient or tired or bored with their children, I wish I could say to them, But they are alive, think of the wonder of that! They may be a care and a burden, but think, they are alive! You can touch them - what a miracle! ...Your sons and daughters are live. Think of that- not dead but alive! Exult and sing. All parents who have lost a child will fell what I mean. Others, luckily, cannot. But I hope they will embrace them with a little added rapture and a keener awareness of joy.
p. 140 All the doctors! - helpless flies now, climbing across the granite face of Death. Johnny died at 11:02pm. Frances reached for him through the ugly, transparent, raincoat curtain of the oxygen machine. I felt his arms, cupping my hands around them, and the warmth gradually left them, receding very slowly upward from his hands. For a long time some warmth remained. Then little the life-color left his face, his lips became blue, and his hands were cold. What is life? It departs covertly.
p. 142 We said goodbye. But to anybody who ever know him, he is still alive, I do not mean merely that he lives in both of us or in the trees at Deerfield or in anything he touched truly, but that the influence, the impact, of a heroic personality continues to exert itself long after mortal bonds are snapped. Johnny transmits permanently something of what he was, since the fabric of the universe is continuous and eternal.
p. 145 Knowing [Johnny] and thinking of his stubborn refusal to accept defeat makes me believe that that spirit will live on. For such there must be an immortality which we who tinker at the body may guess at but not understand.
p. 173 Wednesday: Self analysis: About half time my conscious mind is either asleep or wandering off in space. This... accounts for procrastination etc. I am greatly overintrovert - caused by over-consciousness of what others think of me. Caused by my atheism (?).
p. 191 Today, when I see parents impatient or tired or bored with their children, I wish I could say to them, But they are alive, think of the wonder of that! They may be a care and a burden, but think, they are alive! You can touch them - what a miracle! ...Your sons and daughters are live. Think of that- not dead but alive! Exult and sing. All parents who have lost a child will fell what I mean. Others, luckily, cannot. But I hope they will embrace them with a little added rapture and a keener awareness of joy.
Monday, October 31, 2016
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, r. Nov. 2016
p. 8 Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.
p. 16 ...nothing contributes so much to tranquillise the mind as a steady purpose, - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
p. 48 He heard with attention the little narration concerning my studies, and smiled at the names of Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, but without the contempt that M. Krempe had exhibited. He said, that 'these were men to whose indefatigable zeal modern philosophers were indebted for most of the foundations of their knowledge. They had left to us, as an easier task, to give new names, and arrange in connected classifications, the facts which they in great degree had been the instruments of bringing to light. The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.
p. 49 A man would make but a very sorry chemist if he attended to that department of human knowledge alone.
p. 53 Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.
p. 56 If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country; America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.
p. 75 My country, my beloved country! who but a native can tell the delight I took in again beholding thy streams, thy mountains, and more than all, thy lovely lake!
p. 172 How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!
p. 195 Could I behold this, and live? Alas! life is obstinate, and clings closest where it is most hated.
p. 16 ...nothing contributes so much to tranquillise the mind as a steady purpose, - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
p. 48 He heard with attention the little narration concerning my studies, and smiled at the names of Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, but without the contempt that M. Krempe had exhibited. He said, that 'these were men to whose indefatigable zeal modern philosophers were indebted for most of the foundations of their knowledge. They had left to us, as an easier task, to give new names, and arrange in connected classifications, the facts which they in great degree had been the instruments of bringing to light. The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.
p. 49 A man would make but a very sorry chemist if he attended to that department of human knowledge alone.
p. 53 Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.
p. 56 If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country; America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.
p. 75 My country, my beloved country! who but a native can tell the delight I took in again beholding thy streams, thy mountains, and more than all, thy lovely lake!
p. 172 How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!
p. 195 Could I behold this, and live? Alas! life is obstinate, and clings closest where it is most hated.
Sunday, October 9, 2016
First You Have to Row a Little Boat by Richard Bode, r. Oct. 2016
p. 4 If the condition of fatherhood has taught me one thing, it is the difficulty, if not utter impossibility, of passing on to my offspring the lessons of my separate life.
p. 33 I come now, at this late juncture of my life, to this sudden realization: I have no destination, no real destination, in the literal sense. The destination, the place toward which my life is tending, is the journey itself and not the final stopping place. How I get there is more important than whether I arrive, although I will arrive, and what I must try to remember, now more than ever, is to listen to the wind, and the wind will tell me what to do.
p. 42 The day we invented the screw and the plow, we also invented the computer and the plane; it was only a matter of time, because it was sealed in the genes.
p. 79 From the time I was old enough to read, and possibly before, I had heard the music of language singing in my head. I was intrigued by the sound of words, by their cadence, and by the images they formed in the books I read, and so it was inevitable that, as soon as I learned how, I started to string sentences together so I could let others know what I thought and felt. That was my talent; it was no better or worse than the talent possessed by others, but it was distinctly my own.
p. 134 ...the consequences of indifference to the little wonders of the world are all too plain. Even now an epidemic depression, born of boredom, spreads across the land, and we turn to violence to fill the void. Instead of watching the spider weave its web, we watch slaughter in the living room, murder in the movie house. Hopelessly addicted before we know it, we find that make-believe killings aren't enough; they no longer satisfy the gnawing hunger in our bowels. We need mayhem, real war, real corpses to relieve the tedium that threatens to bury us alive.
p. 182 My son never sailed again; he had other things to do, other places to go, and he didn't have the same compulsion about a sloop in the wind that governed me. He went on to be an expert fisherman and a superb cabinetmaker, and for those endeavors he found his own masters, the ones who spoke to him. By then I had enough sense to give him my blessing and get out of his way.
p. 197 I am overwhelmed by the power of remembrance. I do not dwell in this precise and fleeting moment, but in the accumulation of all my moments for as far back as my human memory goes. I am my past, and to deny my past is to deny myself, because the life I lived right up to this ephemeral instant defines who I am. My life is not in me; it is on what I remember, and I do not possess what I remember so much as it possesses me.
p. 201 I think most of us are afraid that if we let ourselves feel our sorrow for the passing of the life that was, we will never regain our composure again. But the fear is misplaced; what should truly frighten us is the possibility that we might lose the power to recall the life we lived, which gives us our connection to ourselves. Our most terrifying diseases aren't the ones that take our life; they're the ones that cast us adrift on an empty sea by depriving us of our memories.
p. 33 I come now, at this late juncture of my life, to this sudden realization: I have no destination, no real destination, in the literal sense. The destination, the place toward which my life is tending, is the journey itself and not the final stopping place. How I get there is more important than whether I arrive, although I will arrive, and what I must try to remember, now more than ever, is to listen to the wind, and the wind will tell me what to do.
p. 42 The day we invented the screw and the plow, we also invented the computer and the plane; it was only a matter of time, because it was sealed in the genes.
p. 79 From the time I was old enough to read, and possibly before, I had heard the music of language singing in my head. I was intrigued by the sound of words, by their cadence, and by the images they formed in the books I read, and so it was inevitable that, as soon as I learned how, I started to string sentences together so I could let others know what I thought and felt. That was my talent; it was no better or worse than the talent possessed by others, but it was distinctly my own.
p. 134 ...the consequences of indifference to the little wonders of the world are all too plain. Even now an epidemic depression, born of boredom, spreads across the land, and we turn to violence to fill the void. Instead of watching the spider weave its web, we watch slaughter in the living room, murder in the movie house. Hopelessly addicted before we know it, we find that make-believe killings aren't enough; they no longer satisfy the gnawing hunger in our bowels. We need mayhem, real war, real corpses to relieve the tedium that threatens to bury us alive.
p. 182 My son never sailed again; he had other things to do, other places to go, and he didn't have the same compulsion about a sloop in the wind that governed me. He went on to be an expert fisherman and a superb cabinetmaker, and for those endeavors he found his own masters, the ones who spoke to him. By then I had enough sense to give him my blessing and get out of his way.
p. 197 I am overwhelmed by the power of remembrance. I do not dwell in this precise and fleeting moment, but in the accumulation of all my moments for as far back as my human memory goes. I am my past, and to deny my past is to deny myself, because the life I lived right up to this ephemeral instant defines who I am. My life is not in me; it is on what I remember, and I do not possess what I remember so much as it possesses me.
p. 201 I think most of us are afraid that if we let ourselves feel our sorrow for the passing of the life that was, we will never regain our composure again. But the fear is misplaced; what should truly frighten us is the possibility that we might lose the power to recall the life we lived, which gives us our connection to ourselves. Our most terrifying diseases aren't the ones that take our life; they're the ones that cast us adrift on an empty sea by depriving us of our memories.
Tuesday, September 13, 2016
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake, r. Sep. 2016
p. 26 It was not often that Flay approved of happiness in others. He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt. But on an occasion such as this it was different, for the spirit of convention was being rigorously adhered to, and in between his ribs Mr Flay experienced twinges of pleasure.
p. 82 Through the door and into my secret attic. And here it is I am. I am here now. I have been here lots of times but that is in the past. That is over, but now I'm here it's in the present. This is the present. I'm looking on the roofs of the present and I'm leaning on the present window-sill and later on when I'm older I will lean on this window-sill again. Over and over again.
p. 96 When Mrs Slagg reached the cradle she put her fingers to her mouth and peered over it as though into the deepest recesses of an undiscovered world. There he was. The infant Titus. His eyes were open but he was quite still. The puckered-up face of the newly-born child, old as the world, wise as the roots of trees. Sin was there and goodness, love, pity and horror, and even beauty for his eyes were pure violet. Earth's passions, earth's griefs, earth's incongruous, ridiculous humours - dormant, yet visible in the wry pippin of a face.
p. 110 I, as part of my work here, deliver the new generations to the old - the sinless to the sinful, ha, ha, ha, the stainless to the tarnished - oh dear me, the white to the black, the healthy to the diseased. And this ceremony today, my very dear ladyships, is a result of my professional adroitness, ha, ha, ha, on the occasion of a brand new Groan.
p. 163 Steerpike had an unusual gift. It was to understand a subject without appreciating it. He was almost entirely cerebral in his approach. But this could not easily be perceived; so shrewdly, so surely he seemed to enter into the heart of whatever he wished, in his words or deeds, to mimic.
p. 333 For every key position in the Castle there was the apprentice, either the son or the student, bound to secrecy. Centuries of experience had seen to it that there should be no gap in the steady, intricate stream of immemorial behaviour.
p. 412 The autumn and winter winds and the lashing rain storms and the very cold of those seasons, for all their barbarism, were of a spleen that voiced the heart. Their passions were allied to human passions - their cries to human cries. But it was otherwise with this slow pulp of summer, this drag of heat, with the incurious yellow eye within it, floating monotonously, day after day.
p. 422 A closer degree of intimacy had been established in the castle between whatever stood, lay, knelt, was propped, shelved, hidden or exposed, or left ready to use, animate or inanimate, within the castle walls. A kind of unwilling knowledge of the nearness of one thing with another - of one human, to another, though great walls might divide them - of nearness to a clock, or a banister, or a pillar or a book, or a sleeve. For Flay the horrible nearness to himself - to his own shoulder and hand. The out-pouring of a continent of sky had incarcerated and given a weird hyper-reality of closeness to those who were shielded from all but the sound of the storm.
p. 445 ...and lifting his head he noticed how, with a deepening of the rose in the sky, all things were tinted, as though they had awaited the particular concentration of hue which the sky now held, before admitting the opinions of their separate colours to be altered or modified.
p. 455 The sickness was relieved, the sickness and the staleness of the summer day. The scorched leaves pattered one against the next, and the tares screaked thinly together, the tufted heads nodding, and upon the lake was the stippled commotion of a million pin-pricks and the sliding of gooseflesh shadows that released or shrouded momently the dancing of diamonds.
p. 460 The Doctor (for it was Prunesquallor) showed about as much sign of having a pair of hips as an eel set upon its end, while Irma, in white silk, had gone out of her way, it appeared, to exhibit to their worst advantage (her waist being ridiculously tight) a pair of hips capable of balancing upon their osseous shelves enough bric-a-brac to clutter up a kleptomaniac's cupboard.
p. 82 Through the door and into my secret attic. And here it is I am. I am here now. I have been here lots of times but that is in the past. That is over, but now I'm here it's in the present. This is the present. I'm looking on the roofs of the present and I'm leaning on the present window-sill and later on when I'm older I will lean on this window-sill again. Over and over again.
p. 96 When Mrs Slagg reached the cradle she put her fingers to her mouth and peered over it as though into the deepest recesses of an undiscovered world. There he was. The infant Titus. His eyes were open but he was quite still. The puckered-up face of the newly-born child, old as the world, wise as the roots of trees. Sin was there and goodness, love, pity and horror, and even beauty for his eyes were pure violet. Earth's passions, earth's griefs, earth's incongruous, ridiculous humours - dormant, yet visible in the wry pippin of a face.
p. 110 I, as part of my work here, deliver the new generations to the old - the sinless to the sinful, ha, ha, ha, the stainless to the tarnished - oh dear me, the white to the black, the healthy to the diseased. And this ceremony today, my very dear ladyships, is a result of my professional adroitness, ha, ha, ha, on the occasion of a brand new Groan.
p. 163 Steerpike had an unusual gift. It was to understand a subject without appreciating it. He was almost entirely cerebral in his approach. But this could not easily be perceived; so shrewdly, so surely he seemed to enter into the heart of whatever he wished, in his words or deeds, to mimic.
p. 333 For every key position in the Castle there was the apprentice, either the son or the student, bound to secrecy. Centuries of experience had seen to it that there should be no gap in the steady, intricate stream of immemorial behaviour.
p. 412 The autumn and winter winds and the lashing rain storms and the very cold of those seasons, for all their barbarism, were of a spleen that voiced the heart. Their passions were allied to human passions - their cries to human cries. But it was otherwise with this slow pulp of summer, this drag of heat, with the incurious yellow eye within it, floating monotonously, day after day.
p. 422 A closer degree of intimacy had been established in the castle between whatever stood, lay, knelt, was propped, shelved, hidden or exposed, or left ready to use, animate or inanimate, within the castle walls. A kind of unwilling knowledge of the nearness of one thing with another - of one human, to another, though great walls might divide them - of nearness to a clock, or a banister, or a pillar or a book, or a sleeve. For Flay the horrible nearness to himself - to his own shoulder and hand. The out-pouring of a continent of sky had incarcerated and given a weird hyper-reality of closeness to those who were shielded from all but the sound of the storm.
p. 445 ...and lifting his head he noticed how, with a deepening of the rose in the sky, all things were tinted, as though they had awaited the particular concentration of hue which the sky now held, before admitting the opinions of their separate colours to be altered or modified.
p. 455 The sickness was relieved, the sickness and the staleness of the summer day. The scorched leaves pattered one against the next, and the tares screaked thinly together, the tufted heads nodding, and upon the lake was the stippled commotion of a million pin-pricks and the sliding of gooseflesh shadows that released or shrouded momently the dancing of diamonds.
p. 460 The Doctor (for it was Prunesquallor) showed about as much sign of having a pair of hips as an eel set upon its end, while Irma, in white silk, had gone out of her way, it appeared, to exhibit to their worst advantage (her waist being ridiculously tight) a pair of hips capable of balancing upon their osseous shelves enough bric-a-brac to clutter up a kleptomaniac's cupboard.
Wednesday, August 17, 2016
The Star Thrower by Loren Eiseley, r. Aug. 2016
p. xiii In creation there is not only a Yes but also a No; not only a height but also an abyss; not only clarity but also obscurity; not only progress and continuation but also impediment and limitation... not only value but also worthlessness.... It is true that individual creatures and men experience these things in most unequal measure, their lots being assigned by a justice which is curious or ver much concealed. Yet it is irrefutable that creation and creature are good even in the fact that all that is exists in this contrast and antithesis. - Ken Barth
p. xx A satisfactory human life, individually or collectively, is possible only if proper respect is paid to all three worlds. Without Prayer and Work, the Carnival laughter turns ugly, the comic obscenities grubby and pornographic, the mock aggression into real hatred and cruelty. (The hippies, it appears to me, are trying to recover the sense of Carnival which is so conspicuously absent in this age, but so long as they reject Work they are unlikely to succeed.) Without Laughter and Work, Prayer turns Gnostic, cranky, Pharisaic, while those who try to live by Work alone, without Laughter or Prayer, turn into insane lovers of power, tyrants who would enslave Nature to their immediate desires - an attempt which can only end in utter catastrophe, shipwreck on the Isle of the Sirens. - W. H. Auden
p. 32 I began dimly to remember a primitive dialogue as to whether God is a mist or merely a mist maker.... How else would so great a being, assuming his existence, be able throughly to investigate his world, or, perhaps, merely a world that he had come upon, than as he was now proceeding to do?
p. 69 By contrast, only two peoples in the world have known what it is to be alone: the polar Eskimos of the nineteenth century who thought they were the only men in the world and that the explorers who came to them were ghosts, and those inhabitants of the more remote Pacific islets who learned in astonishment that theirs was not the only land above the water that stretched, as they thought, to infinity.
p. 72 Man has always been a builder. Perhaps he has built best in loneliness. At least this appears to be the case in the isles of Polynesia.
p. 75 Finally, however, I sat alone with my glass, a little mellow, perhaps, enjoying the warmth of the fire and remembering the blue snowfields of the North as they should be remembered - in the comfort of warm rooms.
p. 88 We have learned the first biological lesson: that in each generation life passes through the eye of a needle. It exists for a time molecularly and in no recognizable semblance to its adult condition. It instructs its way again into man or reptile.
p. 106 "We must regard the organism as a configuration contrived to evade the tendency of the universal laws of nature," John Joly the geologist once remarked. Unlike the fire in a thicket, life burned cunningly and hoarded its resources. Energy provisions in the seed provided against death. Of all the unexpected qualities of an unexpected universe, the sheer organizing power of animal and plant metabolism is one of the most remarkable, but, as in the case of most everyday marvels, we take it for granted. Where it reaches its highest development, in the human mind, we forget it completely.
p. 110 There were eroded farms no longer running cattle and a diminishing population waiting, as this girl was waiting, for something they would never possess. They were, without realizing it, huntsmen without game, women without warriors. Obsolescence was upon their way of life.
p. 114 What if I am, in some way, only a sophisticated fire that has acquired an ability to regulate its rate of combustion and to hoard its fuel in order to see and walk?
p. 140 The power to change is both creative and destructive - a sinister gift, which, unrestricted, leads onward toward the formless and inchoate void of the possible. This force can only be counterbalanced by an equal impulse toward specificity. Form, once arisen, clings to its identity. Each species and each individual holds tenaciously to its present nature. Each strives to contain the creative and abolishing maelstrom that pours unseen through the generations. The past vanishes; the present momentarily persists; the future is potential only. In this specious present of the real, life struggles to maintain every manifestation, every individuality, that exists. In the end, life always fails, but the amorphous hurrying stream is held and diverted into new organic vessels in which form persists, though the form may not be that of yesterday.
p. 161 [Anecdote about the sunflower on the boxcar, growing there all summer, until boxcar suddenly hooked up and moving and the flower dying, shedding seeds...] A light not quite the sunlight of this earth was touching the flower, or perhaps it was the watering of my aging eye - who knows? The plant would not long survive its journey but the flower seeds were autumn-brown. At every jolt for miles they would drop along the embankment. They were travelers - travelers like Ishmael and myself, outlasting all fierce pursuits and destined to reemerge into future autumns. Like Ishmael, I thought, they will speak with the voice of the one true agent: "I only am escaped to tell thee."
p. 165 We fear the awesome powers we have lifted out of nature and cannot return to her. We fear the weapons we have made, the hatreds we have engendered. We fear the crush of fanatic people to whom we readily sell these weapons. We fear for the value of the money in our pockets that stands symbolically for food and shelter. We fear the growing power of the state to take all these things from us. We fear to walk in our streets at evening. We have come to fear even our scientists and their gifts. We fear, in short, as that self-sufficient Eskimo of the long night had never feared. Our minds, if not our clothes, are hung with invisible amulets: nostrums changed each year for our bodies whether it be chlorophyl toothpaste, the signs of astrology, or cold cures that do not cure: witchcraft nostrums for our society as it fractures into contending multitudes all crying for liberation without responsibility.
p. 167 The truth is that no man expounds upon great ideas to a single audience. He speaks, instead, to audiences, and these in turn will be receiving his message, like the far-traveling light from a star, sometimes centuries after he has delivered it. Man is not one public; he is many and the messages he receives are likely to become garbled in transmission. Again, the ideas of the most honest and well-intentioned scholar may be distorted, reoriented, or trimmed to fit the public needs of a given epoch. In addition, it could be argued that no great act of scientific synthesis is really fixed in the public mind until that public has been prepared to receive it through anticipatory glimpses.
p. 175 When I was young, in a time of boyhood marked by a world as fresh and green and utterly marvelous as on the day of its creation, I found myself attracted by a huge tropical shell which lay upon my aunt's dressing table.
p. 178 ...man possesses latent mental powers beyond what he might culturally express in a given epoch.
p. 178 [French biologist Jean Rostand] knew, with a surety our age is in danger of losing, that if there was ever a good man there will be more.
p. 189 It is remembered that when at last an acquaintance came to ask of Thoreau on his deathbed if he had made his peace with God, the Visitor in him responded simply, "We have never quarreled."
p. 190 For this reason [Thoreau] tended to see men at a distance. For the same reason he saw himself as a first settler in nature, his house the oldest in the settlement. Thoreau reflected in his mind the dreamers of the westward crossing; in this he is totally American.
p. 194 Thoreau, in his final journals, had said that the ancients with their gorgons and sphinxes could imagine more than existed. Modern men, by contrast, could not imagine so much as exists. For more than one hundred years that statement has stood to taunt us. Every succeeding year has proved Thoreau right. The one great hieroglyph, nature, is as unreadable as it ever was and so is her equally wild and unpredictable offspring, man.
p. 201 "There is no more fatal blunderer," [Emerson] protested, "than he who consumes the greater part of life getting a living."
p. 207 Even the extinct head have plucked the great web of life in such a manner that the future still vibrates to their presence.
p. 210 Another of these episodes is reflected in the origins of the human mind. It represents, in a sense, a quantum step: the emergence of genuine novelty. It does so because the brain brought into being what would have been, up until the time of its appearance, an inconceivable event - the world of culture. The mundus alter - this other intangible, faery world of dreams, fantasies, invention - has been flowing through the heads of men since the first ape-man succeeded in cutting out a portion of his environment and delineating it in a transmissible word. With that word a world arose which will die only when the last man utters the last meaningful sound.
p. 220 Our lives are the creation of memory and the accompanying power to extend ourselves outward into ideas and relive them. The finest intellect is that which employs an invisible web of gossamer running into the past as well as across the minds of living men and which constantly responds to the vibrations transmitted through these tenuous lines of sympathy.
p. 226 ...each great novel is a separate and distinct world operating under its own laws with a flora and fauna totally its own. There is communication, or the work is a failure, but the communication releases our own visions, touches some highly personal chord in our own experience.
p. 236 It is not my intention here to decry learning, but only to say that we must understand that learning is endless and that nowhere does it lead us behind the existent world. It may reduce the prejudices of ignorance, set our bones, build our cities. In itself it will never make us ethical men. Yet because ours, we conceive, is an age of progress, and because we know more about time and history than any men before us, we fallaciously equate ethical advance with scientific progress in a point-to-point relationship. Thus as society improves physically, we assume the improvement of the individual...
p. 236 We crossed the divide then, picking our way in places scoured by ancient ice action, through boulder fields where nothing moved, and yet where one could feel time like an enemy hidden behind each stone.
p. 242 If all life were to be swept from the world, leaving only its chemical constituents, no visitor from another star would be able to establish the reality of such a phantom. The dust would lie without visible protest, as it does now in the moon's airless craters, or in the road before our door. Yet this is the same dust which, dead, quiescent, and unmoving, when taken up in the process known as life, hears music and responds to it, weeps bitterly over time and loss, or is oppressed by the looming future that is, on any materialist terms, the veriest shadow of nothing.
p. 242 "The special value of science," a perceptive philosopher once wrote, "lies not in what it makes of the world, but in what it makes of the knower."
p. 244 In man, I know now, there is no such thing as wisdom. I have learned this with my face against the ground. It is a very difficult thing for a man to grasp today, because of his power; yet in his brain there is really only a sort of universal marsh, spotted at intervals by quaking green islands representing the elusive stability of modern science - islands frequently gone as soon as glimpsed. It is our custom to deny this; we are men of precision, measurement and logic; we abhor the unexplainable and reject it. This, too, is a green island.
p. 244 I no longer believed that nature was either natural or unnatural, only that nature now appears natural to man. But the nature that appears natural to man is another version of the muskrat's world under the boat dock, or the elusive sparks over which the physicist made his trembling passage. They were appearances, specialized insights, but unreal because in the constantly onrushing future they were swept away.
p. xx A satisfactory human life, individually or collectively, is possible only if proper respect is paid to all three worlds. Without Prayer and Work, the Carnival laughter turns ugly, the comic obscenities grubby and pornographic, the mock aggression into real hatred and cruelty. (The hippies, it appears to me, are trying to recover the sense of Carnival which is so conspicuously absent in this age, but so long as they reject Work they are unlikely to succeed.) Without Laughter and Work, Prayer turns Gnostic, cranky, Pharisaic, while those who try to live by Work alone, without Laughter or Prayer, turn into insane lovers of power, tyrants who would enslave Nature to their immediate desires - an attempt which can only end in utter catastrophe, shipwreck on the Isle of the Sirens. - W. H. Auden
p. 32 I began dimly to remember a primitive dialogue as to whether God is a mist or merely a mist maker.... How else would so great a being, assuming his existence, be able throughly to investigate his world, or, perhaps, merely a world that he had come upon, than as he was now proceeding to do?
p. 69 By contrast, only two peoples in the world have known what it is to be alone: the polar Eskimos of the nineteenth century who thought they were the only men in the world and that the explorers who came to them were ghosts, and those inhabitants of the more remote Pacific islets who learned in astonishment that theirs was not the only land above the water that stretched, as they thought, to infinity.
p. 72 Man has always been a builder. Perhaps he has built best in loneliness. At least this appears to be the case in the isles of Polynesia.
p. 75 Finally, however, I sat alone with my glass, a little mellow, perhaps, enjoying the warmth of the fire and remembering the blue snowfields of the North as they should be remembered - in the comfort of warm rooms.
p. 88 We have learned the first biological lesson: that in each generation life passes through the eye of a needle. It exists for a time molecularly and in no recognizable semblance to its adult condition. It instructs its way again into man or reptile.
p. 106 "We must regard the organism as a configuration contrived to evade the tendency of the universal laws of nature," John Joly the geologist once remarked. Unlike the fire in a thicket, life burned cunningly and hoarded its resources. Energy provisions in the seed provided against death. Of all the unexpected qualities of an unexpected universe, the sheer organizing power of animal and plant metabolism is one of the most remarkable, but, as in the case of most everyday marvels, we take it for granted. Where it reaches its highest development, in the human mind, we forget it completely.
p. 110 There were eroded farms no longer running cattle and a diminishing population waiting, as this girl was waiting, for something they would never possess. They were, without realizing it, huntsmen without game, women without warriors. Obsolescence was upon their way of life.
p. 114 What if I am, in some way, only a sophisticated fire that has acquired an ability to regulate its rate of combustion and to hoard its fuel in order to see and walk?
p. 140 The power to change is both creative and destructive - a sinister gift, which, unrestricted, leads onward toward the formless and inchoate void of the possible. This force can only be counterbalanced by an equal impulse toward specificity. Form, once arisen, clings to its identity. Each species and each individual holds tenaciously to its present nature. Each strives to contain the creative and abolishing maelstrom that pours unseen through the generations. The past vanishes; the present momentarily persists; the future is potential only. In this specious present of the real, life struggles to maintain every manifestation, every individuality, that exists. In the end, life always fails, but the amorphous hurrying stream is held and diverted into new organic vessels in which form persists, though the form may not be that of yesterday.
p. 161 [Anecdote about the sunflower on the boxcar, growing there all summer, until boxcar suddenly hooked up and moving and the flower dying, shedding seeds...] A light not quite the sunlight of this earth was touching the flower, or perhaps it was the watering of my aging eye - who knows? The plant would not long survive its journey but the flower seeds were autumn-brown. At every jolt for miles they would drop along the embankment. They were travelers - travelers like Ishmael and myself, outlasting all fierce pursuits and destined to reemerge into future autumns. Like Ishmael, I thought, they will speak with the voice of the one true agent: "I only am escaped to tell thee."
p. 165 We fear the awesome powers we have lifted out of nature and cannot return to her. We fear the weapons we have made, the hatreds we have engendered. We fear the crush of fanatic people to whom we readily sell these weapons. We fear for the value of the money in our pockets that stands symbolically for food and shelter. We fear the growing power of the state to take all these things from us. We fear to walk in our streets at evening. We have come to fear even our scientists and their gifts. We fear, in short, as that self-sufficient Eskimo of the long night had never feared. Our minds, if not our clothes, are hung with invisible amulets: nostrums changed each year for our bodies whether it be chlorophyl toothpaste, the signs of astrology, or cold cures that do not cure: witchcraft nostrums for our society as it fractures into contending multitudes all crying for liberation without responsibility.
p. 167 The truth is that no man expounds upon great ideas to a single audience. He speaks, instead, to audiences, and these in turn will be receiving his message, like the far-traveling light from a star, sometimes centuries after he has delivered it. Man is not one public; he is many and the messages he receives are likely to become garbled in transmission. Again, the ideas of the most honest and well-intentioned scholar may be distorted, reoriented, or trimmed to fit the public needs of a given epoch. In addition, it could be argued that no great act of scientific synthesis is really fixed in the public mind until that public has been prepared to receive it through anticipatory glimpses.
p. 175 When I was young, in a time of boyhood marked by a world as fresh and green and utterly marvelous as on the day of its creation, I found myself attracted by a huge tropical shell which lay upon my aunt's dressing table.
p. 178 ...man possesses latent mental powers beyond what he might culturally express in a given epoch.
p. 178 [French biologist Jean Rostand] knew, with a surety our age is in danger of losing, that if there was ever a good man there will be more.
p. 189 It is remembered that when at last an acquaintance came to ask of Thoreau on his deathbed if he had made his peace with God, the Visitor in him responded simply, "We have never quarreled."
p. 190 For this reason [Thoreau] tended to see men at a distance. For the same reason he saw himself as a first settler in nature, his house the oldest in the settlement. Thoreau reflected in his mind the dreamers of the westward crossing; in this he is totally American.
p. 194 Thoreau, in his final journals, had said that the ancients with their gorgons and sphinxes could imagine more than existed. Modern men, by contrast, could not imagine so much as exists. For more than one hundred years that statement has stood to taunt us. Every succeeding year has proved Thoreau right. The one great hieroglyph, nature, is as unreadable as it ever was and so is her equally wild and unpredictable offspring, man.
p. 201 "There is no more fatal blunderer," [Emerson] protested, "than he who consumes the greater part of life getting a living."
p. 207 Even the extinct head have plucked the great web of life in such a manner that the future still vibrates to their presence.
p. 210 Another of these episodes is reflected in the origins of the human mind. It represents, in a sense, a quantum step: the emergence of genuine novelty. It does so because the brain brought into being what would have been, up until the time of its appearance, an inconceivable event - the world of culture. The mundus alter - this other intangible, faery world of dreams, fantasies, invention - has been flowing through the heads of men since the first ape-man succeeded in cutting out a portion of his environment and delineating it in a transmissible word. With that word a world arose which will die only when the last man utters the last meaningful sound.
p. 220 Our lives are the creation of memory and the accompanying power to extend ourselves outward into ideas and relive them. The finest intellect is that which employs an invisible web of gossamer running into the past as well as across the minds of living men and which constantly responds to the vibrations transmitted through these tenuous lines of sympathy.
p. 226 ...each great novel is a separate and distinct world operating under its own laws with a flora and fauna totally its own. There is communication, or the work is a failure, but the communication releases our own visions, touches some highly personal chord in our own experience.
p. 236 It is not my intention here to decry learning, but only to say that we must understand that learning is endless and that nowhere does it lead us behind the existent world. It may reduce the prejudices of ignorance, set our bones, build our cities. In itself it will never make us ethical men. Yet because ours, we conceive, is an age of progress, and because we know more about time and history than any men before us, we fallaciously equate ethical advance with scientific progress in a point-to-point relationship. Thus as society improves physically, we assume the improvement of the individual...
p. 236 We crossed the divide then, picking our way in places scoured by ancient ice action, through boulder fields where nothing moved, and yet where one could feel time like an enemy hidden behind each stone.
p. 242 If all life were to be swept from the world, leaving only its chemical constituents, no visitor from another star would be able to establish the reality of such a phantom. The dust would lie without visible protest, as it does now in the moon's airless craters, or in the road before our door. Yet this is the same dust which, dead, quiescent, and unmoving, when taken up in the process known as life, hears music and responds to it, weeps bitterly over time and loss, or is oppressed by the looming future that is, on any materialist terms, the veriest shadow of nothing.
p. 242 "The special value of science," a perceptive philosopher once wrote, "lies not in what it makes of the world, but in what it makes of the knower."
p. 244 In man, I know now, there is no such thing as wisdom. I have learned this with my face against the ground. It is a very difficult thing for a man to grasp today, because of his power; yet in his brain there is really only a sort of universal marsh, spotted at intervals by quaking green islands representing the elusive stability of modern science - islands frequently gone as soon as glimpsed. It is our custom to deny this; we are men of precision, measurement and logic; we abhor the unexplainable and reject it. This, too, is a green island.
p. 244 I no longer believed that nature was either natural or unnatural, only that nature now appears natural to man. But the nature that appears natural to man is another version of the muskrat's world under the boat dock, or the elusive sparks over which the physicist made his trembling passage. They were appearances, specialized insights, but unreal because in the constantly onrushing future they were swept away.
Monday, August 8, 2016
The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, r. Aug. 2016
p. 237 Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. - George Bernard Shaw
p. 244 The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain. - Colin Wilson
p. 249 In the world of action and negotiation, there is one principle that governs all others: The person who has more options has more power. Don't wait until you need options to search for them.
p. 269 It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is overcertain of his plot. - Paul Theroux
p. 290 Like all innovators ahead of the curve, you will have frightening moments of doubt. Once past the kid-in-a-candy-store phase, the comparative impulse will creep in. The rest of the world will continue with its 9-5 grind, and you'll begin to question your decision to step off the treadmill. Common doubts and self-flagellation include the following:
1) Am I really doing this to be more free and leak a better life, or am I just lazy?
2) Did I quit the rat race because it's bad, or just because I couldn't hack it? Did I just cop out?
3) Is this as good as it gets? Perhaps I was better off when I was following orders and ignorant of the possibilities. It was easier at least.
4) Am I really successful or just kidding myself?
5) Have I lowered my standards to make myself a winner? Are my friends, who are now making twice as much as three years ago, really on the right track?
6) Why am I not happy? I can do anything and I'm still not happy. Do I even deserve it?
p. 297 The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive. - Thich Nhat Hanh
p. 315 Money doesn't change you; it reveals who you are when you no longer have to be nice.
p. 332 Calvin Coolidge once said that nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent; I would add that the second most common is smart people who think their IQ or resume justifies delivering late.
p. 244 The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain. - Colin Wilson
p. 249 In the world of action and negotiation, there is one principle that governs all others: The person who has more options has more power. Don't wait until you need options to search for them.
p. 269 It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is overcertain of his plot. - Paul Theroux
p. 290 Like all innovators ahead of the curve, you will have frightening moments of doubt. Once past the kid-in-a-candy-store phase, the comparative impulse will creep in. The rest of the world will continue with its 9-5 grind, and you'll begin to question your decision to step off the treadmill. Common doubts and self-flagellation include the following:
1) Am I really doing this to be more free and leak a better life, or am I just lazy?
2) Did I quit the rat race because it's bad, or just because I couldn't hack it? Did I just cop out?
3) Is this as good as it gets? Perhaps I was better off when I was following orders and ignorant of the possibilities. It was easier at least.
4) Am I really successful or just kidding myself?
5) Have I lowered my standards to make myself a winner? Are my friends, who are now making twice as much as three years ago, really on the right track?
6) Why am I not happy? I can do anything and I'm still not happy. Do I even deserve it?
p. 297 The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive. - Thich Nhat Hanh
p. 315 Money doesn't change you; it reveals who you are when you no longer have to be nice.
p. 332 Calvin Coolidge once said that nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent; I would add that the second most common is smart people who think their IQ or resume justifies delivering late.
Tuesday, July 12, 2016
The Northern Lights by Lucy Jago, r. Jul. 2016
p. 281 A very few lonely pioneers make their way to high places never before visited. Others follow these new paths, and sometimes the pioneers build roads so wide that the masses may follow. These pioneers create the living conditions of mankind and the majority are living on their work.
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, r. Jun. 2016
p. 267 (Putnam and Campbell) "By many different measures, religiously observant Americans are better neighbors and better citizens than secular Americans - they are more generous with their time and money, especially in helping the needy, and they are more active in community life."
p. 267 Putnam and Campbell reject the New Atheist emphasis on belief and reach a conclusion straight out of Durkheim: "It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing."
p. 292 For example, on a small island or in a small town, you typically don't need to lock your bicycle, but in a big city in the same country, if you only lock the frame, your wheels may get stolen. Being small, isolated, or morally homogeneous are examples of environmental conditions that increase the moral capital of a community. That doesn't mean that small islands and small towns are better places to live overall - the diversity and crowding of big cities makes them more creative and interesting places for many people - but that's the trade-off. (Whether you'd trade away some moral capital to gain some diversity and creativity will depend in part on your brain's settings on traits such as openness to experience and threat sensitivity, and this is part of the reason why cities are usually so much more liberal than the countryside.)
p. 294 Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you're asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire, and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism - which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity - is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.
p. 294 (Bertrand Russell) "It is clear that each party to this dispute - as to all that persist through long periods of time - is partly right and partly wrong. Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation impossible.
p. 305 I find it ironic that liberals generally embrace Darwin and reject "intelligent design" as the explanation for design and adaptation in the natural world, but they don't embrace Adam Smith as the explanation for design and adaptation in the economic world. They sometimes prefer the "intelligent design" of socialist economies, which often ends in disaster from a utilitarian point of view.
p. 317 If you bring one thing home from this last part of the trip, may I suggest that it be the image of a small bump on the back of our heads - the hive switch, just under the skin, waiting to be turned on. We've been told for fifty years now that human beings are fundamentally selfish. We're assaulted by reality TV programs showing people at their worst. Some people actually believe that a woman should shout "fire" if she's being raped, on the grounds that everyone is so selfish that they won't even come out to investigate unless they fear for their own lives. It's not true. We may spend most of our waking hours advancing our own interests, but we all have the capacity to transcend self-interest and become simply a part of a whole. It's not just a capacity; it's the portal to many of life's most cherished experiences.
p. 267 Putnam and Campbell reject the New Atheist emphasis on belief and reach a conclusion straight out of Durkheim: "It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing."
p. 292 For example, on a small island or in a small town, you typically don't need to lock your bicycle, but in a big city in the same country, if you only lock the frame, your wheels may get stolen. Being small, isolated, or morally homogeneous are examples of environmental conditions that increase the moral capital of a community. That doesn't mean that small islands and small towns are better places to live overall - the diversity and crowding of big cities makes them more creative and interesting places for many people - but that's the trade-off. (Whether you'd trade away some moral capital to gain some diversity and creativity will depend in part on your brain's settings on traits such as openness to experience and threat sensitivity, and this is part of the reason why cities are usually so much more liberal than the countryside.)
p. 294 Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you're asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire, and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism - which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity - is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.
p. 294 (Bertrand Russell) "It is clear that each party to this dispute - as to all that persist through long periods of time - is partly right and partly wrong. Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation impossible.
p. 305 I find it ironic that liberals generally embrace Darwin and reject "intelligent design" as the explanation for design and adaptation in the natural world, but they don't embrace Adam Smith as the explanation for design and adaptation in the economic world. They sometimes prefer the "intelligent design" of socialist economies, which often ends in disaster from a utilitarian point of view.
p. 317 If you bring one thing home from this last part of the trip, may I suggest that it be the image of a small bump on the back of our heads - the hive switch, just under the skin, waiting to be turned on. We've been told for fifty years now that human beings are fundamentally selfish. We're assaulted by reality TV programs showing people at their worst. Some people actually believe that a woman should shout "fire" if she's being raped, on the grounds that everyone is so selfish that they won't even come out to investigate unless they fear for their own lives. It's not true. We may spend most of our waking hours advancing our own interests, but we all have the capacity to transcend self-interest and become simply a part of a whole. It's not just a capacity; it's the portal to many of life's most cherished experiences.
Wednesday, May 25, 2016
The Brothers K by David J. Duncan, r. May 2016
p. 17 And his smile fell from his face like ice cream off a little kid's cone.
p. 64 His dad's an up-and-coming preacher, so Micah spends his whole life stuck in church camps, church schools, church basements. And since all he hears there is how good and holy the Church is and how cruel and filthy the Outside World is, and since he hates his good and holy basement life, he assumes he'd rather be in the Outside World, and so tries to prove how much he knows about it - by acting cruel and talking filthy.
p. 125 ...the reason my father did not wax lyrical about warm spring nights or baseball fever was that he wasn't the poet, he was the topic. Papa didn't present the case for baseball, he represented it, and to stand in front of him wondering if the scent of mown grass and plum blossoms made him think of baseball was like asking a bloodstained man with a fly rod and ten dead trout on a stringer if he ever thought about fishing.
p. 152 There are, as far as I can tell, just two types of people who can bear to watch baseball without talking: total non-baseball fans and hard-core players. The hard-core player can watch in silence because his immersion is so complete that he feels no need to speak, while the persona non baseball can do it because his ignorance is so vast that he sees nothing worthy of comment. For the rest of us, watching any sort of baseball-like proceeding without discussing what we're seeing is about as much fun as drinking non-alcoholic beer while fishing without a hook.
p. 179 "You boys are four very different animals, and the older you get, the more unalike you'll get. So I want you to start respecting your differences here and now."
p. 181 "She wants to share her heaven with her kids. Do you understand? She wants the best for you, but gets it mixed up at times with what was once best for her. So it's hard for her to stand back. Hard to let go. Hard to let you each seek your own sorts of heavens. Understand?"
p. 227: In a head-on collision with Fanatics, the real problem is always the same: how can we possibly behave decently toward people so arrogantly ignorant that they believe, first, that they possess Christ's power to bestow salvation, second, that forcing us to memorize and regurgitate a few of their favorite Bible phrases and attend their church is that salvation, and third, that any discomfort, frustration, anger, or disagreement we express in the face of their moronic barrages is due not to their astounding effrontery but to our sinfulness? ... Another Austrian, novelist Heimito von Doderer, put it this way: "Even the most impossible persons who do the most unforgivable things possess substantial reality; from their points of view they are always right - for let them doubt that and they are no longer such impossible persons. And we must pay close heed to those who play such ungrateful roles, for these roles are indispensable. It is no small thing to be a monster or a spiteful idiot, and in the first case to think oneself beautiful, in the second a highly intelligent person. Such characters must be represented. Someone has to do it."
p. 270 One of the great charms of professional baseball used to be that it provided us statistics-lovers with a kind of Mathematical Wildlife Refuge - a nationwide network of painstakingly calibrated and manicured playing fields wherein statistics could frolic about unmolested, appearing to those of us who admired them to possess accurate, consistent, and at times even mythic meanings.
p. 276 Thus did my siblings and I learn one of the hard lessons of life: the best way to strip the allure and dreaminess from a lifelong dream is, very often, simply to have it come true.
p. 304 Obviously, I question his calculations: to slough off half a self in hopes of finding a whole one is not my idea of good math.
p. 319 (Dr. Gurtzner:) "What no social, political, or religious problem will ever manage to take into account is the people's inevitable love and reverence for what mankind really does hold in common. The earth and the hearth fire. The rivers and sky. The richness and complexity of human relationships, and of the changing seasons. The divinity they believe infuses it all. This is why revolutions begin with justifiable unrest, and may rise to open rebellion, but also why, after turning to violence, they rapidly begin to subside."
p. 320 (Dr. Gurtzner:) "Anyone too undisciplined, too self-righteous, or too self-centered to live in the world as it is has a tendency to 'idealize' a world which ought to be. But no matter what political or religious direction such 'idealists' choose, their visions always share one telling charecteristic: in their utopias, heavens, or brave new worlds, their greatest personal weakness suddenly appears to be a strength. In a 'religiously pure' community, for example, any puritanical blockhead who was unable to love his neighbor or turn the other cheek can suddenly sweep the entire world into the category of 'Damned' and pass himself off as 'Saved.' Similarly, in Mr. Chance's revolutionary army, the rudeness and petulance of a mere spoiled brat can suddenly pass itself off as passionate concern for Vietnamese peasants or the black Southern poor."
p. 322 (Dr. Gurtzner:) "What I would wish for the so-called Counterculture is that it be more than a disenfranchised tribe whose sole rite of initiation is disillusionment with the existing culture, as symbolized by one's parents, the Pentagon, and the Ku Klux Klan. I would wish that its members accept neither my tweed coat nor Mr. Chance's knee patches as a sign of authority, but judge us both by the cogency of our thoughts. I would wish that rather than fancy itself 'counter' to the culture, its compassionate ideas would take root in the land and people, and begin to transform them both. But if Mr. Chance does in fact speak for his 'culture,' I fear this breath of fresh air, this grass-roots movement in which even old men like myself have placed such hope, will soon become an empty excuse for youthful effrontery, a faddish cloak for self-indulgence and drug dealers, and a primary cause of a fascistic political and cultural backlash."
p. 329 The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately, or in the long run. - Henry David Thoreau
p. 346 "You call hellfire a virtue?" Hank roared in rebuttal. "I call hellfire a threat," Natasha said, "and 'love thy neighbor' a value. But I believe in hell, or something close to it. I think hell is what we get right here on earth when people trade their spiritual and political values in on spiritual and political threats."
p. 429 There are kinds of human problems which really do seem, as our tidy expressions would have it, to "come to a head" and "demand to be dealt with." But there are also problems, often just as serious, which come to nothing that we can recognize or openly deal with. Some long-lived, insidious problems simply slip us off to one side of ourselves. Some gently rob us of just enough energy or faith so that days which once took place on a horizontal plane become an endless series of uphill slogs. And some - like high water working year after year at the roots of a riverside tree - quietly undercut our trust or our hope, our sense of place, or of humor, our ability to empathize, or to feel enthused, and we don't sense impending danger, we don't feel the damage at all, till one day, to our amazement, we find ourselves crashing to the ground. Peter had one of these kinds of problems.
p. 432 (Everett:) "But there's always something missing. Having things missing, even indispensible things, is a fact of life, don't you think? And life goes on anyhow. Except for the missing parts. Which were indispensable, so of course it goes on all out of whack."
p. 466 Then, by accident, [Everett] glanced too high, and noticed that his buttercups had also begun to list. They were no longer standing the way he'd stood them, no longer engaged in the glorious basking that overwhelmed him on the headland. They were leaning toward the light now, craning toward it. He'd been dead wrong about the blitheness. The buttercups now seemed to know - to understand with that purely physical knowledge that all living things possess - that something was wrong. Their craning was like a cry: they were calling out with all the body language they possessed for a life or a place they had no minds with which to remember. Confused by the intensity of his feelings, Everett tried to defy them: he gave the can a half twist, spinning the blossoms away from the window, then stepped outside and went about his morning chores.
p. 515 And when the night breeze eased into the spruces, when he heard the big trees begin to pronounce the nine-hour-long word that meant Warm Full-Mooned Spring Night, even another instant of waiting was suddenly unthinkable.
p. 516 But I finally concluded that it is an inalienable right of lovers everywhere to become temporarily worthless to the world.
p. 517 I cherish a theory I once heard propounded by G. Q. Durham that professional baseball is inherently antiwar. The most overlooked cause of war, his theory runs, is that it's so damned interesting. It takes hard effort, skill, love, and a little luck to make times of peace consistently interesting. About all it takes to make war interesting is a life. The appeal of trying to kill others without being killed yourself, according to Gale, is that it brings suspense, terror, honor, disgrace, rage, tragedy, treachery, and occasionally even heroism within range of guys who, in times of peace, might lead lives of unmitigated blandness. But baseball, he says, is one activity that is able to generate suspense and excitement on a national scale, just like war. And baseball can only be played in peace. Hence G. Q.'s thesis that pro ballplayers - little as some of them may want to hear it - are basically just a bunch of unusually well-coordinated guys working hard and artfully to prevent wars, by making peace more interesting.
p. 621 Because what is an offering, really? What can human beings actually give to God? What can they give to each other even? And what sorts of receptacle can contain these gifts? Work camps and insane asylums, Indian trains and church pews, bullpens and little blue boxes ... Who belongs in what? When do they belong there? Who truly gives what to whom? These were questions we were all struggling to answer not in words, but with our lives.
p. 641 [Peter's] experience of the inner life, he tells the kids, is more like a blind man learning to get around a dark but beautiful city with one of those long, sensitive canes. Going into wilderness alone is simply a way of getting your cane.
Too long to quote: pp. 210-211, p. 380, p. 625
p. 64 His dad's an up-and-coming preacher, so Micah spends his whole life stuck in church camps, church schools, church basements. And since all he hears there is how good and holy the Church is and how cruel and filthy the Outside World is, and since he hates his good and holy basement life, he assumes he'd rather be in the Outside World, and so tries to prove how much he knows about it - by acting cruel and talking filthy.
p. 125 ...the reason my father did not wax lyrical about warm spring nights or baseball fever was that he wasn't the poet, he was the topic. Papa didn't present the case for baseball, he represented it, and to stand in front of him wondering if the scent of mown grass and plum blossoms made him think of baseball was like asking a bloodstained man with a fly rod and ten dead trout on a stringer if he ever thought about fishing.
p. 152 There are, as far as I can tell, just two types of people who can bear to watch baseball without talking: total non-baseball fans and hard-core players. The hard-core player can watch in silence because his immersion is so complete that he feels no need to speak, while the persona non baseball can do it because his ignorance is so vast that he sees nothing worthy of comment. For the rest of us, watching any sort of baseball-like proceeding without discussing what we're seeing is about as much fun as drinking non-alcoholic beer while fishing without a hook.
p. 179 "You boys are four very different animals, and the older you get, the more unalike you'll get. So I want you to start respecting your differences here and now."
p. 181 "She wants to share her heaven with her kids. Do you understand? She wants the best for you, but gets it mixed up at times with what was once best for her. So it's hard for her to stand back. Hard to let go. Hard to let you each seek your own sorts of heavens. Understand?"
p. 227: In a head-on collision with Fanatics, the real problem is always the same: how can we possibly behave decently toward people so arrogantly ignorant that they believe, first, that they possess Christ's power to bestow salvation, second, that forcing us to memorize and regurgitate a few of their favorite Bible phrases and attend their church is that salvation, and third, that any discomfort, frustration, anger, or disagreement we express in the face of their moronic barrages is due not to their astounding effrontery but to our sinfulness? ... Another Austrian, novelist Heimito von Doderer, put it this way: "Even the most impossible persons who do the most unforgivable things possess substantial reality; from their points of view they are always right - for let them doubt that and they are no longer such impossible persons. And we must pay close heed to those who play such ungrateful roles, for these roles are indispensable. It is no small thing to be a monster or a spiteful idiot, and in the first case to think oneself beautiful, in the second a highly intelligent person. Such characters must be represented. Someone has to do it."
p. 270 One of the great charms of professional baseball used to be that it provided us statistics-lovers with a kind of Mathematical Wildlife Refuge - a nationwide network of painstakingly calibrated and manicured playing fields wherein statistics could frolic about unmolested, appearing to those of us who admired them to possess accurate, consistent, and at times even mythic meanings.
p. 276 Thus did my siblings and I learn one of the hard lessons of life: the best way to strip the allure and dreaminess from a lifelong dream is, very often, simply to have it come true.
p. 304 Obviously, I question his calculations: to slough off half a self in hopes of finding a whole one is not my idea of good math.
p. 319 (Dr. Gurtzner:) "What no social, political, or religious problem will ever manage to take into account is the people's inevitable love and reverence for what mankind really does hold in common. The earth and the hearth fire. The rivers and sky. The richness and complexity of human relationships, and of the changing seasons. The divinity they believe infuses it all. This is why revolutions begin with justifiable unrest, and may rise to open rebellion, but also why, after turning to violence, they rapidly begin to subside."
p. 320 (Dr. Gurtzner:) "Anyone too undisciplined, too self-righteous, or too self-centered to live in the world as it is has a tendency to 'idealize' a world which ought to be. But no matter what political or religious direction such 'idealists' choose, their visions always share one telling charecteristic: in their utopias, heavens, or brave new worlds, their greatest personal weakness suddenly appears to be a strength. In a 'religiously pure' community, for example, any puritanical blockhead who was unable to love his neighbor or turn the other cheek can suddenly sweep the entire world into the category of 'Damned' and pass himself off as 'Saved.' Similarly, in Mr. Chance's revolutionary army, the rudeness and petulance of a mere spoiled brat can suddenly pass itself off as passionate concern for Vietnamese peasants or the black Southern poor."
p. 322 (Dr. Gurtzner:) "What I would wish for the so-called Counterculture is that it be more than a disenfranchised tribe whose sole rite of initiation is disillusionment with the existing culture, as symbolized by one's parents, the Pentagon, and the Ku Klux Klan. I would wish that its members accept neither my tweed coat nor Mr. Chance's knee patches as a sign of authority, but judge us both by the cogency of our thoughts. I would wish that rather than fancy itself 'counter' to the culture, its compassionate ideas would take root in the land and people, and begin to transform them both. But if Mr. Chance does in fact speak for his 'culture,' I fear this breath of fresh air, this grass-roots movement in which even old men like myself have placed such hope, will soon become an empty excuse for youthful effrontery, a faddish cloak for self-indulgence and drug dealers, and a primary cause of a fascistic political and cultural backlash."
p. 329 The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately, or in the long run. - Henry David Thoreau
p. 346 "You call hellfire a virtue?" Hank roared in rebuttal. "I call hellfire a threat," Natasha said, "and 'love thy neighbor' a value. But I believe in hell, or something close to it. I think hell is what we get right here on earth when people trade their spiritual and political values in on spiritual and political threats."
p. 429 There are kinds of human problems which really do seem, as our tidy expressions would have it, to "come to a head" and "demand to be dealt with." But there are also problems, often just as serious, which come to nothing that we can recognize or openly deal with. Some long-lived, insidious problems simply slip us off to one side of ourselves. Some gently rob us of just enough energy or faith so that days which once took place on a horizontal plane become an endless series of uphill slogs. And some - like high water working year after year at the roots of a riverside tree - quietly undercut our trust or our hope, our sense of place, or of humor, our ability to empathize, or to feel enthused, and we don't sense impending danger, we don't feel the damage at all, till one day, to our amazement, we find ourselves crashing to the ground. Peter had one of these kinds of problems.
p. 432 (Everett:) "But there's always something missing. Having things missing, even indispensible things, is a fact of life, don't you think? And life goes on anyhow. Except for the missing parts. Which were indispensable, so of course it goes on all out of whack."
p. 466 Then, by accident, [Everett] glanced too high, and noticed that his buttercups had also begun to list. They were no longer standing the way he'd stood them, no longer engaged in the glorious basking that overwhelmed him on the headland. They were leaning toward the light now, craning toward it. He'd been dead wrong about the blitheness. The buttercups now seemed to know - to understand with that purely physical knowledge that all living things possess - that something was wrong. Their craning was like a cry: they were calling out with all the body language they possessed for a life or a place they had no minds with which to remember. Confused by the intensity of his feelings, Everett tried to defy them: he gave the can a half twist, spinning the blossoms away from the window, then stepped outside and went about his morning chores.
p. 515 And when the night breeze eased into the spruces, when he heard the big trees begin to pronounce the nine-hour-long word that meant Warm Full-Mooned Spring Night, even another instant of waiting was suddenly unthinkable.
p. 516 But I finally concluded that it is an inalienable right of lovers everywhere to become temporarily worthless to the world.
p. 517 I cherish a theory I once heard propounded by G. Q. Durham that professional baseball is inherently antiwar. The most overlooked cause of war, his theory runs, is that it's so damned interesting. It takes hard effort, skill, love, and a little luck to make times of peace consistently interesting. About all it takes to make war interesting is a life. The appeal of trying to kill others without being killed yourself, according to Gale, is that it brings suspense, terror, honor, disgrace, rage, tragedy, treachery, and occasionally even heroism within range of guys who, in times of peace, might lead lives of unmitigated blandness. But baseball, he says, is one activity that is able to generate suspense and excitement on a national scale, just like war. And baseball can only be played in peace. Hence G. Q.'s thesis that pro ballplayers - little as some of them may want to hear it - are basically just a bunch of unusually well-coordinated guys working hard and artfully to prevent wars, by making peace more interesting.
p. 621 Because what is an offering, really? What can human beings actually give to God? What can they give to each other even? And what sorts of receptacle can contain these gifts? Work camps and insane asylums, Indian trains and church pews, bullpens and little blue boxes ... Who belongs in what? When do they belong there? Who truly gives what to whom? These were questions we were all struggling to answer not in words, but with our lives.
p. 641 [Peter's] experience of the inner life, he tells the kids, is more like a blind man learning to get around a dark but beautiful city with one of those long, sensitive canes. Going into wilderness alone is simply a way of getting your cane.
Too long to quote: pp. 210-211, p. 380, p. 625
Friday, January 15, 2016
Rabbit, Run by John Updike, r. Jan. 2016
p. 38 Tothero is silent before replying. His great strength is in these silences; he has the disciplinarian's trick of waiting a long moment while his words gather weight.
p. 50 Ruth bends down and slides over. The skin of her shoulder gleams and then dims in the shadow of the booth. Rabbit sits down too and feels her rustle beside him, settling in, the way women do, fussily, as if making a nest.
p. 81 In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
p. 92 And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate. And that little thing [marriage] Janice and I had going, boy, it was really second-rate.
p. 96 Pigeons with mechanical heads waddle away from their shoetips and resettle, chuffling, behind them.
p. 183 He's had very few visitors; I suppose that's the tragedy of teaching school. You remember so many and so few remember you.
p. 194 The fullness [of youth] ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.
p. 243 The houses, many of them no longer lived in by the people whose faces he all knew, are like the houses in a town you see from the train, their brick faces stern in posing the riddle, Why does anyone live here? Why was he set down here; why is this particular ordinary town for him the center and index of a universe that contains great prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, cities, seas? This childish mystery - the mystery of "any place," prelude to the ultimate, "Why am I me?" - reignites panic in his heart.
p. 50 Ruth bends down and slides over. The skin of her shoulder gleams and then dims in the shadow of the booth. Rabbit sits down too and feels her rustle beside him, settling in, the way women do, fussily, as if making a nest.
p. 81 In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
p. 92 And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate. And that little thing [marriage] Janice and I had going, boy, it was really second-rate.
p. 96 Pigeons with mechanical heads waddle away from their shoetips and resettle, chuffling, behind them.
p. 183 He's had very few visitors; I suppose that's the tragedy of teaching school. You remember so many and so few remember you.
p. 194 The fullness [of youth] ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.
p. 243 The houses, many of them no longer lived in by the people whose faces he all knew, are like the houses in a town you see from the train, their brick faces stern in posing the riddle, Why does anyone live here? Why was he set down here; why is this particular ordinary town for him the center and index of a universe that contains great prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, cities, seas? This childish mystery - the mystery of "any place," prelude to the ultimate, "Why am I me?" - reignites panic in his heart.
Monday, January 4, 2016
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, r. Jan. 2016
p. 32 When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
p. 69 And is not time even as love is, undivided and paceless? But if in your thought you must measure time into seasons, let each season encircle all the other seasons, and let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing.
p. 90 We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered.
p. 100 Life, and all that lives, is conceived in the mist and not in the crystal. And who knows but a crystal is mist in decay?
p. 69 And is not time even as love is, undivided and paceless? But if in your thought you must measure time into seasons, let each season encircle all the other seasons, and let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing.
p. 90 We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered.
p. 100 Life, and all that lives, is conceived in the mist and not in the crystal. And who knows but a crystal is mist in decay?
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