This is Luke's Commonplace Book, circa April, 2007.
We would never call inexplicable little insights “hunches,” for fear of drawing the universe’s attention. But they happened, and you knew you had been in the proximity of one that had come through if you saw a detective kiss his or her fingers and touch his or her chest where a pendant to Warsha, patron saint of inexplicable inspirations, would, theoretically, hang.
— from The City & The City by China Miéville
Come watch with me the shaft of fire that glows
In yonder West: the fair, frail palaces,
The fading Alps and archipelagoes,
And great cloud-continents of sunset-seas.- Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Miracles
Via: Man with a Spade
Very often people don’t listen to you when you speak to them. It’s only when you talk to yourself that they prick up their ears.
— John Ashberry (via thrumminginthemixture)
Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.
— Sydney Smith, Lecture IX : On the Conduct of the Understanding (via triadic)
(via wesleyhill)
The fun part of research is finding what you arent looking for.
— Erik Spiekermann (via robertogreco)
(via robertogreco)
[W]ork to create small-is-beautiful alternatives.
— Alan Jacobs (via robertogreco)
(via robertogreco)
There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.
— Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain (via meganannaneff)
(via thrumminginthemixture)
Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.
…
In other words, a person sitting quietly under a tree in the backyard, while everyone else is clinking glasses on the patio, is more likely to have an apple land on his head. (Newton was one of the world’s great introverts: William Wordsworth described him as “A mind for ever/ Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.”)
— from The Rise of the New Groupthink by Susan Cain, via Rob
Our world is ideologically fragmented, and the range of positions, multiplied by the attractions of expressive individualism, is growing. There are strong incentives to remain within the bounds of the human domain, or at least not to bother exploring beyond it. The level of understanding of some of the great languages of transcendence is declining; in this respect, massive unlearning is taking place. The individual pursuit of happiness as defined by consumer culture still absorbs much of our time and energy, or else the threat of being shut out of this pursuit through poverty, unemployment, incapacity galvanizes all our efforts. All this is true, and yet the sense that there is something more presses in. Great numbers of people feel it-in moments of reflection about their life, in moments of relaxation in nature, in moments of bereavement and loss, and quite wildly and unpredictably. Our age is very far from settling into a comfortable unbelief. Although many individuals do so, and more still seem to on the outside, the unrest continues to surface. Could it ever be otherwise? The secular age is schizophrenic, or better, deeply cross-pressured.
We are, after all, only very clever tailless primates, doing the best we can, but limited. Perhaps we must all own up to being agnostic, unable to know the unknowable.
— from Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow
Frank Chimero’s The Being There Diary
The Being There Diary asks a simple question: “What was the very best moment of your day?”
If you ask yourself, ‘What’s the best thing that happened today?’ it actually forces a certain kind of cheerful retrospection that pulls up from the recent past things to write about that you wouldn’t otherwise think about. If you ask yourself, ‘What happened today?’ it’s very likely that you’re going to remember the worst thing, because you’ve had to deal with it—you’ve had to rush somewhere or somebody said something mean to you—that’s what you’re going to remember. But if you ask what the best thing is, it’s going to be some particular slant of light, or some wonderful expression somebody had, or some particularly delicious salad. I mean, you never know…
See also: on keeping a logbook
The great modern enemy of friendship has turned out to be love. By love, I don’t mean the principle of giving and mutual regard that lies at the heart of friendship. And I don’t mean what Saint Paul meant by love, the Christian notion of indiscriminate and universal *agape* or *caritas*, which is based on the universal love of the Christian God. I mean love in the banal, ubiquitous, compelling, and resilient modern meaning of love: the romantic love that obliterates all other goods, the love to which every life must apparently lead, the love that is consummated in sex and celebrated in every particle of our popular culture, the love that is institutionalized in marriage and instilled as a primary and ultimate good in every Western child. I mean *eros*, which is more than sex but is bound up with sex. I mean the longing for union with another being, the sense that such a union resolves the essential quandary of human existence, the belief that only such a union can abate the loneliness that seems to come with being human, and deter the march of time that threatens to trivialize our very existence. The centrality of this love in our culture is so ingrained that it is almost impossible to conceive of a world in which it might not be so. And this is strange in a society in which the delusions and dangers of such love are all around us: the wreckage of many modern marriages, the mass of unwanted pregnancies, the devastation of AIDS, the social ostracism of the single and the old. Even those sources of authority that might once have operated as a check on this extraordinary cultural pre-eminence have caved in to the propaganda of *eros*. The Christian churches, which once wisely taught the primary of *caritas* to *eros*, and held out the virtue of friendship as equal to the benefits of conjugal love, are now our culture’s primary and obsessive propagandists for the marital unit and its capacity to resolve all human ills and satisfy all human needs. Far from seeing divorce and abortion and sexual disease as reasons to question our culture’s apotheosis of *eros*, these churches see them merely as opportunities to intensify the idolatry of *eros* properly conducted and achieved. We live in a world, in fact, in which respect and support for *eros* has acquired all the hallmarks of a cult. It has become our civil religion.
— from the best thing Andrew Sullivan has written (via wesleyhill)
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
—
From Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
May we fight the things that reduce us for the company and truth that make life big. Happy new year, everyone. Here’s to 2012.
(via viafrank)
