Ten Great Mysteries by Edgar Allan Poe, r. Oct. 2014

p. 11 There are few persons who have not, at some period of their lives, amused themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own minds must have been attained. The occupation is often full of interest; and he who attempts it for the first time is astonished by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal.

p. 52 "That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who had the fashion of calling everything "odd" that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid and absolute legion of "oddities."

Fooled by Randomness by Nicholas Taleb, r. Oct. 2014

p. ix This book is the synthesis of, on one hand, the no-nonsense practitioner of uncertainty who spent his professional life trying to resist being fooled by randomness and trick the emotions associated with probabilistic outcomes and, on the other, the aesthetically obsessed, literature-loving human being willing to be fooled by any form of nonsense that is polished, refined, original, and tasteful. I am not capable of avoiding being the fool of randomness; what I can do is confine it to where it brings some aesthetic gratification.

p. xi I believe that the principal asset I need to protect and cultivate is my deep-seated intellectual insecurity. My motto is "my principal activity is to tease those who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously."

p. xviii Most journalists do not take things to seriously: After all, this business of journalism is about pure entertainment, not a search for truth, particularly when it comes to radio and television.

p. xxi There seems to be some evidence that conversations and correspondence with intelligent people is a better engine for personal edification that plain library-ratting (human warmth: Something in our nature may help us grow ideas while dealing and socializing with other people).

p. 30 The interesting thing about these physicists did not lie in their ability to discuss fluid dynamics; it is that they were naturally interested in a variety of intellectual subjects and provided pleasant conversation.

p. 58 The applicability of Solon's warning to a life in randomness, in contrast with the exact opposite message delivered by the prevailing media-soaked culture, reinforces my instinct to value distilled thought over newer thinking, regardless of its apparent sophistication - another reason to accumulate the hoary volumes by my bedside (I confess that the only news items I currently read are the far more interesting upscale social gossip stories found in Tatler, Paris Match, and Vanity Fair - in addition to The Economist). Aside from the decorum of ancient thought as opposed to the coarseness of fresh ink, I have spent some time phrasing the idea in the mathematics of evolutionary arguments and conditional probability. For an idea to have survived so long across so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise, was filtered out.

p. 67 Finally, I reckon that I am not immune to such an emotional defect [of monitoring seemingly important (but really meaningless) information real-time]. But I deal with it by having no access to information, except in rare circumstance. Again, I prefer to read poetry. If an event is important enough, it will find its way to my ears. I will return to this point in time.

p. 68 My problem is that I am not rational and I am extremely prone to drown in randomness and to incur emotional torture. I am aware of my need to ruminate on park benches and in cafes away form information, but I can only do so if I am somewhat deprived of it. My sole advantage in life is that I know some of my weaknesses, mostly that I am incapable of taming my emotions facing news and incapable of seeing a performance with a clear head. Silence is far better.

p. 71 One conceivable way to discriminate between a scientific intellectual and a literary intellectual is by considering that a scientific intellectual can usually recognize the writing of another but that the literary intellectual would not be able to tell the difference between lines jotted down by a scientist and those by a glib nonscientist.

p. 77 We do not need to be rational and scientific when it comes to the details of our daily life - only in those that can harm us and threaten our survival. Modern life seems to invite us to do the exact opposite; become extremely realistic and intellectual when it comes to such matters as religion and personal behavior, yet as irrational as possible when it comes to matters ruled by randomness.

p. 85 Veteran trader Marty O'Connell calls this the firehouse effect. He had observed that firemen with much downtime who talk to each other for too long come to agree on many things that an outside, impartial observer would find ludicrous (they develop political ideas that are very similar).

p. 92 There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.

p. 102 Accordingly, it is not how likely an event is to happen that matters, it is how much is made when it happens that should be the consideration. How frequent the profit is irrelevant; it is the magnitude of the outcome that counts.

p. 122 I do not know if it applies to other people, but, in spite of my being a voracious reader, I have rarely been truly affected in my behavior (in any durable manner) by anything I have read. A book can make a strong impression, but such an impression tends to wane after some newer impression replaces it in my brain (a new book). I have to discover things by myself (…the "Stove is Hot"…). These self-discoveries last.

p. 124 I was at the age [teens and early twenties] when one felt like one needed to read everything, which prevented one from making contemplative stops.

p. 144 I will set aside the point that I see no special heroism in accumulating money, particularly if, in addition, there person is foolish enough to not even try to derive any tangible benefit from the wealth (aside from the pleasure of regularly counting the beans). I have no large desire to sacrifice much of my personal habits, intellectual pleasures, and personal standards in order to become a billionaire like Warren Buffett, and I certainly do not see the point of becoming one if I were to adopt Spartan (even miserly) habits and live in my starter house. Something about the praise lavished upon him for living in austerity while being so rich escapes me; if austerity is the end, he should become a monk or a social worker - we should remember that becoming rich is a purely selfish act, not a social one. The virtue of capitalism is that society can take advantage of people's greed rather than their benevolence, but there is no need to, in addition, extol such greed as a moral (or intellectual) accomplishment (the reader can easily see that, aside from very few exceptions like George Soros, I am not impressed by people with money).

p. 151 I will probably lecture him that Machiavelli ascribed to luck at least a 50% role in life (the rest was cunning and bravura), and that was before the creation of modern markets.

p. 175 It is obvious that the information age, by homogenizing our tastes, is causing the unfairness to be even more acute - those who win capture almost all the customers.

p. 198 What used to strike me as a child upon visiting museums is that ancient Greek statues exhibit men with traits indistinguishable from ours (only more harmonious and aristocratic). I was so wrong to believe that 2,200 years was a long time. Proust wrote frequently about the surprise people have when coming across emotions in Homeric heroes that are similar to those we experience today.

p. 231 For it is harder to act as if one were ignorant than as if one were smart; scientists know that it is emotionally harder to reject a hypothesis than to accept it (what are called type I and type II errors) - quite a difficult matter when we have such sayings as felix qui po'tuit cognoscere causas (happy is he who understands what is behind things). It is very hard for us to just shut up. We are not cut out for it.

p. 244 I conclude with the following saddening remark about scientists in the soft sciences. People confuse science and scientists. Science is great, but individual scientists are dangerous. They are human; they are marred by the biases humans have. Perhaps even more. For most scientists are hard-headed, otherwise they would not derive the patience and energy to perform the Herculean tasks asked of them, like spending eighteen hours a day perfecting their doctoral thesis. A scientist may be forced to act like a cheap defense lawyer rather than a pure seeker of the truth. A doctoral thesis is "defended" by the applicant; it would be a rare situation to see the student change his mind upon being supplied with a convincing argument. But science is better than scientists. It was said that science evolves from funeral to funeral. After the LTCM collapse, a new financial economist will emerge, who will integrate such knowledge into his science. He will be resisted by the older ones, but, again, they will be much closer to their funeral date than he.

p. 258 ...research on happiness shows that those who live under a self-imposed pressure to be optimal in their enjoyment of things suffer a measure of distress.... We know that people of a happy disposition tend to be of the satisficing [a blend of satisfying and maximizing] kind, with a set of what they want in life and an ability to stop upon gaining satisfaction. Their goals and desires do not move along with the experiences.... An optimizer, by comparison, is the kind of person who will uproot himself and change his official residence just to reduce his tax bill by a few percentage points. (You would think that the entire point of a higher income is to be free to choose where to live; in fact it seems, for these people, wealth causes them to increase their dependence!) Getting rich results in his seeing flaws in the goods and services he buys. The coffee is not warm enough.... The table is too far from the window...

p. 260 I came to this conclusion when, about a decade ago, I stopped using an alarm clock. I still woke up around the same time, but I followed my own personal clock. A dozen minutes of fuzziness and variability in my schedule made a considerable difference.... Living like this, one can also go to bed early and not optimize one's schedule by squeezing every minute out of one's evening. At the limit, you can decide whether to be (relatively) poor, but free of your time, or rich but as dependent as a slave.

p. 262 It took me an entire lifetime to find out what my generator is. It is: We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract. Everything good (aesthetics, ethics) and wrong (Fooled by Randomness) with us seems to flow from it.

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, r. Oct. 2014

p. 60 "A dead man looks created," Lauderback continued. "As a scuplture looks created. It makes you marvel at the work of the design; makes you think of the designer."

p. 119 Tom complete this costume (for so he perceived of his daily dress: as a costume that could be completed, to effect) he smoked a pipe, a fat calabash with a bitten-down stem - though his affection for the instrument had less to do with the pleasures of the habit than for the opportunity for emphasis it provided. He often held it in his teeth unlit, and spoke out of the corner of his mouth like a comic player delivering an aside - a comparison which suited him, for if Nilssen was vain of the impressions he created, it was because he knew that he created them well.

What Makes Us Happy? by Joshua Wolf Shenk (article in The Atlantic), r. Oct. 2014

The youth that the old envy is accommpanied by the miserable process of getting from 25 to 35. We've got all this health, and all this youth, and you're scared stiff that when it's all said and done, you're not going to amount to a hill of beans; and if you just wait, virtually all the men, by the time they were 45, or 50, amounted to something. Knowing that is such relief, and you just don't know it at 30. I mean, this process is fun - it's all change - but it's just as much fun to have wrinkles and reminisce. The job isn't conforming, it isn't keeping up with the Joneses, it is playing and working and loving, and loving is probably the most important. Happiness is love.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/06/what-makes-us-happy/307439/?single_page=true

Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard, r. Sep. 2013

(Kindle)

A former professor of ancient languages, literature, and mathematics who had paid for his first year of college by working as a carpenter, Garfield's interests and abilities were as deep as they were broad.

Inexplicably, it seemed that the only cause for which Garfield would not fight was his own political future. In an early-adopted eccentricity that would become for him a central "law of life," he refused to seek an appointment or promotion of any kind. "I suppose I am morbidly sensitive about any reference to my own achievements," he admitted. "I so much despise a man who blows his own horn, that I go to the other extreme."

Garfield himself referred to [the Democrat party] as the "rebel party" and growled that "every Rebel guerrilla and jayhawker, every man who ran to Canada to avoid the draft, every bounty-jumper, every deserter, every cowardly sneak that ran from danger and disgraced his flag,… every villain, of whatever name or crime, who loves power more than justice, slavery more than freedom, is a Democrat.

Watson had left the Bell Telephone Company about the same time Bell did, announcing his attention to travel and enjoy his modest wealth.

"You [black men] were not made free merely to be allowed to vote, but in order to enjoy an equality of opportunity in the race of life," Garfield had told a delegation of 250 black men just before he was elected president. "Permit no man to praise you because you are black, nor wrong you because you are black. Let it be known that you are ready and willing to work out your own material salvation by your own energy, your own worth, your own labor."

I have sometimes thought that we cannot know any man thoroughly well while he is in perfect health. As the ebb-tide discloses the real lines of the shore and the bed of the sea, so feebleness, sickness, and pain bring out the real character of a man. - James A. Garfield

Science had not been able to prevent the president's death, Bell conceded, but neither had religion. "If prayers could avail to save the sick," he reasoned sadly, "surely the earnest heartfelt cry of a whole nation to God would have availed in this case.

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, r. Sep. 2014

p. 56 And in autumn airy spheres of thistledown floated into the same street, lodged upon the shop fronts, blew into drains; and innumerable tawny and yellow leaves skimmed along the pavement, and stole through people's doorways into their passages with a hesitating scratch on the floor, like the skirts of timid visitors.

p. 116 [Elizabeth-Jane] sat up with her mother to the utmost of her strength night after night. To learn to take the universe seriously there is no quicker way than to watch - to be a "waker," as the country-people call it. Between the hours at which the last toss-pot went by and the first sparrow shook himself, the silence in Casterbridge - barring the rare sound of the watchman - was broken in Elizabeth's ear only by the time-piece in the bedroom ticking frantically against the clock on the stairs; ticking harder and harder till it seemed to clang like a gong; and all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, and blinking at the candle; why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape. Why they stared at her so helplessly, as if waiting for the touch of some wand that would release them from terrestrial constraint; what that chaos called consciousness, which spin in her at this moment like a top, tended to, and began in. Her eyes fell together; she was awake, yet she was asleep.

p. 157 "It's better to stay at home, and that's true; but a man must live where his money is made. It is a great pity, but it's always so!"

p. 172 The Scotchman seemed hardly the same Farfrae who had danced with her and walked with her in a delicate poise between love and friendship - that period in the history of a love when alone it can be said to be unalloyed with pain.

p. 184 [The fortune teller] was sometimes astonished that men could profess so little and believe so much at his house, when at church they professed so much and believed so little.

p. 192 Nearly the whole town had gone into the fields. The Casterbridge populace still retained the primitive habit of helping one another in time of need; and thus, though the corn belonged to the farming section of the little community - that inhabiting the Durnover quarter - the remainder was no less interested in the labour of getting it home."

p. 231 "If I could afford it, be hanged if I wouldn't keep a church choir at my own expense to play and sing to me at these low, dark times of my life. But the bitter thing is, that when I was rich I didn't need what I could have, and now I be poor I can't have what I need!"

p. 317 And thus Henchard found himself again on the precise standing which he had occupied a quarter of a century before. Externally there was nothing to hinder his making another start on the upward slope, and by his new lights achieving higher things than his soul in its half-formed state had been able to accomplish. But the ingenious machinery contrived by the Gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum - which arranges that wisdom to do shall come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing - stood in the way of all that. He had no wish to make an arena a second time of a world that had become a mere painted scene to him…. Very often, as his hay-knife crunched down among the sweet-smelling grassy stems, he would survey mankind and say to himself: "Here and everywhere be folk dying before their time like frosted leaves, though wanted by their families, the country, and the world; while I, an outcast, an encumberer of the ground, wanted by nobody, and despised by all, live on against my will!"

p. 332 …[Elizabeth-Jane] thought she could perceive no great personal difference between being respected in the nether parts of Casterbridge and glorified at the uppermost end of the social world.

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner, r. Sep. 2014

p. 3 Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake. Cataract sufferers must see like this when the bandages are removed after the operation: every detail as sharp as if seen for the first time, yet familiar too, known from before the time of blindness, the remembered and the seen coalescing as in a stereoscope.

p. 10 [Reminiscing] is what I do for a good long time. It is no effort. Everything compels it. From the high porch, the woods pitching down to the lake are more than a known and loved place. They are a habitat we were once fully adapted to, a sort of Peaceable Kingdom where species such as ours might evolve unchallenged and find their step on the staircase of being. Sitting with it all under my eye, I am struck once more, as I was up on the Wightman road, by its changelessness. The light is nostalgic about mornings past and optimistic about mornings to come.

p. 18 Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting? Was our friendship for the Langs born out of simple gratitude to this woman who had the kinds to call on a strange young wife stuck in a basement without occupation or friends? Was I that avid for praise, to feel so warm toward them both because the professed to like my story? Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me? Or did I (I hope I did) like Charity Lang on sight because she was what she was, open, friendly, frank, a little ribald as it turned out, energetic, interested, as full of vitality as her smile was full of light?

p. 43 I believe that most people have some degree of talent for something - forms, colors, words, sounds. Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations too many. Something.

p. 46 But he won't talk about his poems. He turns the conversation to that banal subject, fascinating to non-writers, of why writers write. Ego enhancement, sure. What else? Psychological imbalance? Neurosis? Trauma? And if trauma, how far can trauma go before it stops being stimulating and becomes destructive? Academic pressures to publish, do those mean anything? Not much, we agree. How about the reforming impulse, a passion for social justice?

p. 57 Aunt Emily believes in the freedom of summer. She doesn't much care what the children do so long as they do something, and know what they are doing. It is idleness and randomness of mind that she cannot abide.

p. 59 it is a fact that no child ever followed George Barnwell Ellis to his work, or aped his way with any tool. His routines are simply not imitable. He appears mistily and cheerfully at breakfast, and shortly disappears - in winter to his office or to the Divinity School, where a child would have a difficult time finding anything at all to do, and in summer up the path to his think house, which by his assumption and Aunt Emily's interdict is off limits to the young.

p. 88 "She's great, she's thoughtful, and loving, she's kept a book on both of the children since the day they were born - you know, first smile, first tooth, first word, first sign of individuality as they develop. Pictures at every stage. She's teaching Barney to count and tell time and read already, they set aside a half hour every afternoon. She's simply incredible, the way she can organize a day. But one thing, I don't think I ever saw her pick up one of those cute kids and give him a big squeeze, just because he's himself, and hers, and she loves him. When we get ours, don't let me have an agenda every time I'm with him."

p. 89 But what memory brings back from there is not politics, or the meagerness of living on a hundred and fifty dollars a month, or even the writing I was doing, but the details of friendship - parties, picnics, walks, midnight conversations, glimpses from the occasional unencumbered hours. Amicitia lasts better than res publica, and at least as well as ars publica. Or so it seems now. What really illuminates those months is the faces of our friends.

p. 123 Some things that astonished Sally - hard beds, hard chairs, unfinished walls, Ivory soap, no liquor harder than sherry - could not dispel the impression I got of a complicity expensively purchased and self-consciously cherished…

p. 130 It seemed to me that nothing could do so much for a man as a good long jail sentence. To have all of one's physical needs taken care of by specially appointed assistants; to be marched to and from meals with neither choice nor cooking, payment nor dishwashing, on one's mind; to be sent at stipulated times to the yard for exercise; to have whole mornings, afternoons, evenings of freedom from interruption, with only the passing and repassing of a guard's steps in the corridor to assure and emphasize it; to hear the clang of opening and closing of doors down the cellblock and know that one needn't be concerned, one still had months to serve - who could not write the history of the world under such circumstances? Who could not, in a well-insulated but austerely padded cell, think all the high thoughts, read all the great books, perhaps even write one or two?

p. 157 While we were at it, we might have discussed the dangers inherent in conducting your life according to rules whimsically adopted from some book, and ignoring the testimony and experience of people around you.

p. 174 I said, "Puttering can be a comfort. It goes with rumination, and he's a ruminator. He should have been a literate gentleman farmer with a telescope in his backyard, and a big library, and all kinds of time to think." "A rustic Newton?" she flashed. "Where's his Principia?" There was something so close to contempt in her voice that she made me mad. "Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals?" I said. "We're all decent godless people, Hallie. Let's not be too hard on each other if we don't set the world afire. There's been enough of that."

p. 185 Good cooks dirty a lot of dishes, especially when they themselves don't have to wash them.

p. 194 - Hallie, you've got the wrong idea of what writers do. They don't understand any more than other people. They invent only plots they can resolve. They ask the questions they can answer. Those aren't people that you see in books, those are constructs. Novels or biographies, it makes no difference. I couldn't reproduce the real Sid and Charity Lang, much less explain them; and if I invented them I'd be falsifying something I don't want to falsify.

p. 202 Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.

p. 237 "[Death]'s as natural as being born," she said, "and even if we stop being the individuals we once were, there's an immortality of organic molecules that's absolutely certain. Don't you find that a wonderful comfort? I do. To think that we'll become part of the grass and trees and animals, that we'll stay right here where we loved it while we were alive. People will drink us with their morning milk and pour us as maple syrup over their breakfast pancakes. So I say we should be happy and grateful, and make the most of it. I've had a wonderful life, I've loved every minute."

p. 263 For a moment I studied her sad, resigned, trying-to-be-cheerful face. I thought of how it might be to look at the face of the woman you loved and had lived your life with, and know that this might be the last, or the next-to-last, or the next-to-next-to-last time you would see it.