/findings/Recent content in Findings on Conor O'DriscollHugo -- gohugo.ioen-us/findings/digging-deep-austin-kleon/Sun, 03 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/digging-deep-austin-kleon/Is reading Faulkner going to make you a better person? Absolutely not. But the whole universe wants you to be optimized, productive, monetized. And sitting around and reading a work of art when it is not your job to do so is a rebellious act that insists I am a human being, actually, and not a cog, not a good little worker, not a cozy girl eating the slop that is fed to me./findings/life-learnings-from-years-of-the-marginalian-the-marginalian/Sat, 02 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/life-learnings-from-years-of-the-marginalian-the-marginalian/So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance./findings/surprised-by-joy-quotes-by-cs-lewis/Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/surprised-by-joy-quotes-by-cs-lewis/The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it “annihilates space.” It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from traveling ten. Of course if a man hates space and wants it to be annihilated, that is another matter./findings/surprised-by-joy-quotes-by-cs-lewispage-of/Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/surprised-by-joy-quotes-by-cs-lewispage-of/I fancy that most of those who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years./findings/0748/Sat, 22 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0748/There is no other day. All days are present now. This moment contains all moments./findings/0749/Sat, 22 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0749/This day will never come again and anyone who fails to eat and drink and taste and smell it will never have it offered to him again in all eternity. The sun will never shine as it does today./findings/0853/Sun, 16 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0853/Sleep came swiftly and peacefully, more like a mystic intensifying of perception than any changeful entrance into another world. For his days and nights were equally full of dreaming./findings/0854/Sun, 16 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0854/But even where he did not accept, he absorbed; her young idealism worked upon his maturity to produce an amalgam very gentle and wise./findings/0850/Sat, 15 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0850/Children of one, two, or even three throw the whole of themselves into everything they do. They embrace life, and devour it; it is why they learn so fast and are such good company./findings/0851/Sat, 15 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0851/The only difference between bad and good students in this respect is that the bad students forget right away, while the good students are careful to wait until after the exam./findings/0852/Sat, 15 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0852/We made a terrible mistake when (with the best of intentions) we separated children from adults and learning from the rest of life, and one of our most urgent tasks is to take down the barriers we have put between them and let them come back together./findings/0849/Thu, 13 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0849/They value most in children what children least value in themselves. Small wonder that their effort; to build character is such a failure; they don’t know it when they see it./findings/0747/Sun, 09 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0747/At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes./findings/0847/Tue, 04 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0847/Do children really need so much praise? When a child, after a long struggle, finally does the cube puzzle, does he need to be told that he has done well? Doesn’t he know, without being told, that he has accomplished something?/findings/0848/Tue, 04 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0848/The good thinker can take his time because he can tolerate uncertainty, he can stand not knowing. The poor thinker can’t stand not knowing; it drives him crazy./findings/0845/Mon, 06 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0845/But the ideas of order of all too many schools are that order should, must, can only rest on fear, threat, and punishment. They would rather have systems of order based on fear, even when they don’t work, than systems of order based on the children’s cooperation–that work./findings/0846/Mon, 06 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0846/It is nonsense to think that we can give children a love of “succeeding” without at the same time giving them an equal dread of “failing.”/findings/0842/Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0842/Everything is made out of Magic; leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden—in all the places./findings/0843/Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0843/“It is a very nice song,” he said. “I like it. Perhaps it means just what I mean when I want to shout out that I am thankful to the Magic.” He stopped and thought in a puzzled way. “Perhaps they are both the same thing. How can we know the exact names of everything?”/findings/0844/Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0844/I never knowed it by that name but what does th’ name matter? I warrant they call it a different name i’ France an’ a different one i’ Germany. Th’ same thing as set th’ seeds swellin’ an’ th’ sun shinin’ made thee a well lad an’ it’s th’ Good Thing. It isn’t like us poor fools as think it matters if us is called out of our names. Th’ Big Good Thing doesn’t stop to worrit, bless thee./findings/0841/Tue, 09 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0841/That afternoon the whole world seemed to devote itself to being perfect and radiantly beautiful and kind to one boy./findings/0839/Mon, 08 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0839/Give her simple, healthy food. Let her run wild in the garden. Don’t look after her too much. She needs liberty and fresh air and romping about./findings/0840/Mon, 08 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0840/One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands alone and throws one’s head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one’s heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun—which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years./findings/0746/Sun, 31 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0746/I am on the side of the unreason­able aesthetic judgment, always./findings/0837/Wed, 27 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0837/The craftsman survives so long as the standards for judging his work are shared by different classes. The professional appears when it is necessary for the craftsman to leave his class and “emigrate” to the ruling class, whose standards of judgement are different./findings/0838/Wed, 27 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0838/Explanations, analyses, interpretation, are no more than frames or lenses to help the spectator focus his attention more sharply on the work. The only justification for criticism is that it allows us to see more clearly./findings/0834/Sat, 23 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0834/Within a mere 30 years of its invention as a gadget for an elite, photography was being used for police filing, war reporting, military reconnaissance, pornography, encyclopedic documentation, family albums, postcards, anthropological records (often, as with the Indians in the United States, accompanied by genocide), sentimental moralising, inquisitive probing (the wrongly named “candid camera”): aesthetic effects, news reporting and formal portraiture./findings/0835/Sat, 23 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0835/The invention of the lightweight camera — so that the taking of a photograph ceased to be a ritual and became a “reflex”./findings/0836/Sat, 23 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0836/No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does./findings/0832/Mon, 11 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0832/Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera’s eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes./findings/0833/Mon, 11 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0833/The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images./findings/0831/Mon, 04 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0831/Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents’ pots and pans—the used things, warm with generations of human touch, that Rilke celebrated in The Duino Elegies as being essential to a human landscape./findings/0830/Sun, 03 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0830/Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art./findings/0828/Sun, 25 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0828/To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged./findings/0829/Sun, 25 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0829/When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures./findings/0745/Sat, 24 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0745/It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire./findings/0825/Sun, 18 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0825/You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I!/findings/0826/Sun, 18 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0826/It is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live./findings/0827/Sun, 18 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0827/Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them./findings/0823/Sun, 11 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0823/It seems to me that in both science and art we are trying desperately to connect with something—this is how we achieve universality. In art, that something is people, their experiences and sensitivities. In science, that something is nature, the physical world and physical laws./findings/0824/Sun, 11 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0824/My rabbi once told me that man has always made of God what he wished to be himself./findings/0821/Sat, 03 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0821/Ah, those days … for many years afterwards their happiness haunted me. Sometimes, listening to music, I drift back and nothing has changed. The long end of summer. Day after day of warm weather, voices calling as night came on and lighted windows pricked the darkness and, at day-break, the murmur of corn and the warm smell of fields ripe for harvest. And being young./findings/0822/Sat, 03 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0822/We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever – the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face./findings/0819/Fri, 02 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0819/A tremendous waterfall of colour, the blues of the apex falling, then seething into a turbulence of red; like all truly great works of art, hammering you with its whole before beguiling you with its parts./findings/0820/Fri, 02 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0820/For me that will always be the summer day of summer days – a cloudless sky, ditches and roadside deep in grass, poppies, cuckoo pint, trees heavy with leaf, orchards bulging over hedge briars./findings/0818/Thu, 01 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0818/And, if I thought at all, it was that I’d like this to go on and on, no-one going, no-one coming, autumn and winter always loitering around the corner, summer’s ripeness lasting for ever,/findings/0816/Sat, 27 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0816/Somebody else may have my rapturous glance at the archangels. The springing of the yellow line of morning out of the misty deep of dawn, is glory enough for me./findings/0817/Sat, 27 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0817/“We have repeatedly demonstrated our species’ bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good.”/findings/0814/Tue, 23 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0814/Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so./findings/0815/Tue, 23 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0815/Is life worth living? Well, I can only answer for myself. I like to be alive, to breathe the air, to look at the landscape, the clouds, the stars, to repeat old poems, to look at pictures and statues, to hear music, the voices of the ones I love. I enjoy eating and smoking. I like good cold water. I like to talk with my wife, my girls, my grandchildren. I like to sleep and to dream./findings/0812/Mon, 22 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0812/Who, when he dies, can tell himself, “I have comprehended as much world as I am able, and have transformed it into my humanness,” has fulfilled his aim./findings/0813/Mon, 22 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0813/Feuerbach thought that monotheistic religion had anyway resulted from humans’ choosing their own best qualities, naming those qualities “God,” and worshipping them./findings/0811/Fri, 19 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0811/My defence at any Last Judgement would be ‘I was trying to connect up and use all the fragments I was born with.’/findings/0810/Mon, 15 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0810/And if we still want miracles, what greater miracle could there be than this beautifully ordered, varied world all round us?/findings/0807/Sun, 27 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0807/This is one of the toughest tests for creative artists: to remain ever unaware of their best qualities in order not to rob them of authenticity./findings/0808/Sun, 27 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0808/Perhaps the genders are more closely related than people think. The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this: that male and female, freed from all false feelings and disinclinations, do not seek each other as objects but rather as siblings and neighbors; to become human together; simply, seriously, and patiently helping each other bear the burden that sexuality has placed on them./findings/0809/Sun, 27 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0809/But there is much beauty here because there is much beauty everywhere./findings/0806/Thu, 24 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0806/Learn what you find worth learning. I hope you will love them as I have./findings/0743/Sat, 19 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0743/I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer./findings/0744/Sat, 19 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0744/The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise./findings/0742/Mon, 31 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0742/There’s a logic that’s long guided Hollywood, at least since the beginning of the blockbuster era: Teens will watch things intended for them but will shy from things aimed squarely at adults. Adults will watch things aimed at them, but will also watch things aimed at (older) teens. Men will watch things made for them, but will shy from things made “for” women. Women will watch films made for them and will also readily watch things made for men./findings/0805/Sat, 15 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0805/A picture represented something other than itself; a painting represents itself. A picture mediates between a viewer and an object in pictorial space; a painting is an object to which the viewer relates without mediation…/findings/0804/Wed, 12 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0804/See a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour/findings/0803/Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0803/He was the first to understand that before looking for extraterrestrials in the depths of space, we ought to begin by contacting the intraterrestrials./findings/0801/Sat, 20 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0801/It was long thought that computers in general and artificial intelligence programmes in particular would mingle human concepts and present them from a new angle. In short, electronics was expected to deliver a new philosophy. But even when it is presented differently, the raw material remains the same: ideas produced by human imaginations. It is a dead end. The best way to renew thought is to go outside the human imagination./findings/0802/Sat, 20 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0802/In Africa, people are sadder about the death of an old man than about that of a new-born baby. The old man represented a wealth of experience that might have benefited the tribe whereas the new-born baby had not lived and could not even be aware of dying. In Europe, people are sad about the new-born baby because they think he might well have done wonderful things if he had lived./findings/0800/Thu, 11 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0800/…the human race being one of the few species capable of abandoning or mistreating its offspring./findings/0799/Wed, 10 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0799/Entomologists have long been inclined to the theory that ants are incapable of suffering and that this is the basis of their society’s cohesion./findings/0798/Thu, 04 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0798/Individualism is our true enemy. If a brother is in need and you allow him to die of hunger, you are no longer worthy of belonging to the world. If a lost soul asks you for help and you close the door in his face, you are not one of us./findings/0797/Sun, 16 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0797/But her life was useful/findings/0796/Wed, 12 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0796/Your intentions will be judged by your actions./findings/0740/Thu, 06 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0740/Whether [my drawings] were good or bad had nothing to do with their most valuable asset: They were a means of experiencing a place or a moment more deeply./findings/0741/Thu, 06 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0741/Originality, personality, or style can neither be encouraged nor prevented. Forget the matter./findings/0795/Sun, 02 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0795/I pray every single second of my life. I never get on my knees or anything like that, but I pray with my work./findings/0794/Wed, 29 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0794/A stick beats more ugliness into a person than it ever beats out./findings/0739/Sat, 18 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0739/We all have three voices: the one we think with, the one we speak with, and the one we write with./findings/0738/Sun, 12 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0738/Love isn’t something we fall in or out of, but something we remember we are part of/findings/0737/Mon, 23 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0737/At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough./findings/0733/Sat, 14 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0733/I tend to agree with the theory that if you want to keep a memory pristine, you must not call upon it too often, for each time it is revisited, you alter it irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left by experience but the last time you recalled it. With tiny differences creeping in at each cycle, the exercise of our memory does not bring us closer to the past but draws us farther away./findings/0734/Sat, 14 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0734/Memory is a poet, not a historian./findings/0735/Sat, 14 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0735/The memory of happiness is perhaps also happiness/findings/0750/Sat, 14 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0750/A flower is not a flower. It is made only of non-flower elements: sunshine, clouds, time, space, earth, minerals, gardeners, and so on. A true flower contains the whole universe. If we return any one of those non-flower elements to its source, there will be no flower./findings/0792/Tue, 10 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0792/He sat down to write, before realizing he had no idea what to say. He didn’t want to say anything: just send her a smile./findings/0793/Tue, 10 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0793/This is a small community, where everyone knows that sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember. Children can grow up having no knowledge of the indiscretion of their father in his youth, or of the illegitimate sibling who lives fifty miles away and bears another man’s name. History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent./findings/0791/Tue, 03 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0791/It is a luxury to do something that serves no practical purpose: the luxury of civilization./findings/0732/Mon, 02 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0732/You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth./findings/0731/Sat, 05 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0731/Eventually everything connects./findings/0730/Mon, 19 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0730/I believe that if you look long and hard enough at what you loved best at fourteen and how you lived then and what you saw in the world, it will reveal both the world and you./findings/0790/Tue, 30 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0790/It is hard to think about computers of the future without projecting onto them the properties and the limitations of those we think we know today./findings/0729/Sat, 13 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0729/All I am, is what I’m going after./findings/0788/Sat, 23 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0788/Trust in families and neighborhoods and individuals to make sense of the important question, “What is education for?” If some of them answer differently from what you might prefer, that’s really not your business, and it shouldn’t be your problem./findings/0789/Sat, 23 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0789/After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves./findings/0786/Thu, 21 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0786/No matter how good the individuals who manage an institution are, institutions lack a conscience because they measure by accounting methods./findings/0787/Thu, 21 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0787/That has always been the dark side of the American dream, the search for an easy way out, a belief in magic./findings/0783/Sun, 17 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0783/No one ever became indifferent to these steamers because nothing important can ever really be boring./findings/0784/Sun, 17 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0784/“We were making the future,” he said, and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!/findings/0785/Sun, 17 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0785/Networks of urban reformers will convene to consider the problems of homeless vagrants, but a community will think of its vagrants as real people, not abstractions. Ron, Dave, or Marty—a community will call its bums by their names. It makes a difference./findings/0728/Sat, 16 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0728/“I don’t make the rules.” “Sure you do. We all do.”/findings/0782/Sat, 16 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0782/But keep in mind that in the United States almost nobody who reads, writes, or does arithmetic gets much respect. We are a land of talkers; we pay talkers the most and admire talkers the most, and so our children talk constantly, following the public models of television and schoolteachers. It is very difficult to teach the “basics” anymore because they really aren’t basic to the society we’ve made./findings/0780/Fri, 15 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0780/I’ve come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality,/findings/0781/Fri, 15 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0781/The teaching function, in a healthy community, belongs to everyone./findings/0727/Wed, 13 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0727/I don’t need the lives, I need the aliveness of the work./findings/0778/Wed, 13 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0778/She really does hate parties and crowds and she really does love people one by one in such a way that she’s bound to always be involved in parties and crowds./findings/0779/Wed, 13 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0779/But everyone knows that it would have been much better to have been popular in high school when your blood was clean, and pure lust and kisses lasted forever. Chocolate Cokes in high school are better than caviar on a yacht when you’re forty-five./findings/0725/Sat, 11 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0725/It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring - caring deeply and passionately, really caring - which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives./findings/0726/Sat, 11 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0726/Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray, i.e., we are not looking for it. So, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for./findings/0724/Tue, 17 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0724/In a world as vast as this one, seeing something once actually counts for a lot./findings/0776/Wed, 11 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0776/In his way of putting it, our existence comes before our essence, whereas for designed objects their essence comes before their existence./findings/0777/Wed, 11 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0777/Some people who think about these inequalities will just say, ‘Oh well, life’s not fair’ and shrug their shoulders. These are usually the ones who have been particularly lucky./findings/0774/Fri, 06 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0774/Everybody to count for one, nobody to count for more than one./findings/0775/Fri, 06 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0775/It’s not that truth is somehow ‘out there’ waiting for us to find it. Truth for James was simply what works, what has a beneficial impact on our lives./findings/0723/Tue, 03 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0723/I think today we do not know how to go about building a water fountain. What we know is how to build one thousand water fountains./findings/0773/Mon, 11 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0773/Great original artists take a tradition into themselves. They have not shunned but digested it. Then the very conflict set up between it and what is new in themselves and in their environment creates the tension that demands a new mode of expression./findings/0722/Sun, 10 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0722/To lure back enchantment, we must learn to create the nook, to appreciate the wilder garden, to consider the power of shadows and small spaces, to welcome living materials over insensate ones./findings/0772/Wed, 06 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0772/There’s a corollary to Andy Warhol’s idea that in the future everybody would be famous for fifteen minutes. Now, I think in the future nobody will be famous, only known locally to their friends and followers, because of the fragmentation of mass media./findings/0721/Wed, 06 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0721/People have done this before, but not us./findings/0771/Tue, 05 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0771/There is a story about a Japanese artist who painted a picture of a garden with trees. When it was finished, the patron asked why there was almost nothing in view – just a sprig of cherry with a small bird on it in one corner. ‘If I had filled the picture with things,’ the painter replied, ‘where would the bird have been able to fly?’/findings/0770/Mon, 04 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0770/Impressionism could not have happened without the invention of the collapsible tube, which made it possible to paint outside. That was technology again./findings/0720/Sun, 03 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0720/Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats./findings/0769/Sun, 03 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0769/What we see in Atget’s pictures, therefore, is partly time./findings/0767/Sat, 02 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0767/There was, however, a tension between the idea that the camera image simply was the truth, and the feeling that painting offered a way of depicting the world that was richer, and in an imaginative and emotional way, truer./findings/0768/Sat, 02 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0768/But that is what the photograph does: it separates us from the world./findings/0765/Wed, 30 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0765/The Chinese say you need three things for paintings: the hand, the eye and the heart./findings/0766/Wed, 30 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0766/The camera existed for centuries before the invention of photography in the early 19th century./findings/0763/Tue, 29 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0763/When you use a camera to draw a face what you are doing is fast-forwarding the measuring./findings/0764/Tue, 29 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0764/Often it is the soft lack of focus in certain areas – an effect that can only have been seen in an optically created image – that generates the mystery and beauty of his [Vermeer’s] art. Therefore, to deny he used a lens is to misunderstand his achievement, which lay, precisely, in finding the poetry in this new way of seeing the world./findings/0762/Sat, 26 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0762/You bring your own time to a picture, whereas film and video art bring their own time to you./findings/0718/Fri, 25 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0718/the generation immediately following had spent most of its time online making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think they meant it. Except after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were Nazis./findings/0719/Fri, 25 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0719/The trouble was that they had a dictator now, which, according to some people (white), they had never had before, and according to other people (everyone else), they had only ever been having, constantly, since the beginning of the world./findings/0761/Thu, 24 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0761/Looking at Monet’s late masterpieces is like looking at a grand Chinese landscape: the cosmos seems to be constantly vanishing and appearing in front of you./findings/0760/Sun, 20 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0760/Much of what we call ‘modernist’ painting was an attempt to find ways of making space that were different from either the space of a photograph or linear perspective./findings/0759/Sat, 19 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0759/All pictures are, in one way or another, time machines. That is, they condense the appearance of something – a person, a scene, a sequence – and preserve it. It takes a certain amount of time to make them. And it also takes time to look at them, varying from a second to a lifetime./findings/0758/Fri, 18 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0758/Dong Qichang held that it was through depictions of landscape that an educated man could show his understanding of the principles of nature. This was art as a spiritual exercise./findings/0757/Thu, 17 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0757/The main reason why pictures, and other things, survive is because someone loves them./findings/0754/Wed, 16 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0754/Two dimensions don’t really exist in nature. A surface only looks two dimensional because of our scale. If you were a little fly, a canvas or even a piece of paper would seem quite irregular, whereas to us, some things can be seen as flat. What’s really flat in nature?/findings/0755/Wed, 16 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0755/Reality is a slippery concept, because it is not separate from us. Reality is in our minds./findings/0756/Wed, 16 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0756/Art doesn’t progress. Some of the best pictures were the first ones./findings/0752/Sat, 05 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0752/It was exhilarating. It was glorious. It was more than I had imagined. At the same time, it was all entirely logical. All of it followed inexorably and irrefutably from the few laws I had laid down. I had to do nothing but sit back and watch as the cosmos unfolded in time./findings/0753/Sat, 05 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0753/Wouldn’t the beauty have more meaning with other minds to admire it? Wouldn’t it be transformed by other minds? I’m not talking about a passive admiration of beauty, but a participation in that beauty, in which everyone is enlarged./findings/0619/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0619/The progression of time along a developmental path was a concept foreign to Native Americans until the Europeans forced them into history./findings/0620/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0620/You should have changed if you wanted to remain yourself but you were afraid to change./findings/0621/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0621/But race is the child of racism, not the father./findings/0622/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0622/I have never believed the brothers who claim to “run,” much less “own,” the city. We did not design the streets. We do not fund them. We do not preserve them./findings/0623/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0623/It was a calm December day. Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled in strollers./findings/0624/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0624/Poetry aims for an economy of truth—loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts./findings/0625/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0625/So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope./findings/0626/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0626/The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers./findings/0627/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0627/The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against their world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak and Liberty, or Cold Spring and Park Heights, or outside Mondawmin Mall, with their hands dipped in Russell sweats. I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear, and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered ’round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away./findings/0628/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0628/The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority./findings/0629/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0629/There was before you, and then there was after, and in this after, you were the God I’d never had./findings/0630/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0630/There was no golden era when evildoers did their business and loudly proclaimed it as such./findings/0631/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0631/Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality./findings/0632/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0632/Each time is true, but the truths are not the same./findings/0633/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0633/Events are triggered by other events, not by time./findings/0634/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0634/For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone./findings/0635/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0635/For one, perhaps The Old One is not interested in getting close to his creations, intelligent or not. For another, it is not obvious that knowledge is closeness./findings/0636/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0636/If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly./findings/0637/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0637/Long ago, before the Great Clock, time was measured by changes in heavenly bodies: the slow sweep of stars across the night sky, the arc of the sun and variation in light, the waxing and waning of the moon, tides, seasons. Time was measured also by heartbeats, the rhythms of drowsiness and sleep, the recurrence of hunger, the menstrual cycles of women, the duration of loneliness./findings/0638/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0638/Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. Families comfort a dying uncle not because of a likely inheritance, but because he is loved at that moment. Employees are hired not because of their résumés, but because of their good sense in interviews. Clerks trampled by their bosses fight back at each insult, with no fear for their future. It is a world of impulse./findings/0639/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0639/The man and woman follow a winding path of small white stones to a restaurant on a hill. Have they been together a lifetime, or only a moment? Who can say?/findings/0640/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0640/Which was cause and which effect, which future and which past?/findings/0641/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0641/Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first./findings/0642/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0642/“Our basic argument is that there isn’t such a thing as a building,” says Duffy. “A building properly conceived is several layers of longevity of built components.”/findings/0643/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0643/A building is not primarily a building; it is primarily property, and as such, subject to the whims of the market./findings/0644/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0644/All these shearing layers of change add up to a whole for the building, but how do they add up to a whole for the occupants? How can they change toward the humans in them rather than away, as so many seem to do?/findings/0645/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0645/Art is the exposure to the tensions and problems of a false world so that man may endure exposing himself to the tensions and problems of the real world./findings/0646/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0646/Buildings keep being pushed around by three irresistible forces—technology, money, and fashion./findings/0647/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0647/Even flying buttresses on cathedrals were a fix that became a feature./findings/0648/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0648/He distinguishes four layers, which he calls Shell, Services, Scenery, and Set. Shell is the structure, which lasts the lifetime of the building (fifty years in Britain, closer to thirty-five in North America). Services are the cabling, plumbing, air conditioning, and elevators (“lifts”), which have to be replaced every fifteen years or so. Scenery is the layout of partitions, dropped ceilings, etc., which changes every five to seven years. Set is the shifting of furniture by the occupants, often a matter of months or weeks./findings/0649/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0649/It is at the times of major changes in a system that the quick processes can most influence the slow./findings/0650/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0650/Sullivan’s form-follows-function misled a century of architects into believing that they could really anticipate function./findings/0651/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0651/Temporary is permanent, and permanent is temporary. Grand, final-solution buildings obsolesce and have to be torn down because they were too overspecified to their original purpose to adapt easily to anything else. Temporary buildings are thrown up quickly and roughly to house temporary projects. Those projects move on soon enough, but they are immediately supplanted by other temporary projects—of which, it turns out, there is an endless supply./findings/0652/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0652/The older a building gets, the more we have respect and affection for its evident maturity, for the accumulated human investment it shows, for the attractive patina it wears—muted bricks, worn stairs, colorfully stained roof, lush vines./findings/0653/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0653/The quick processes provide originality and challenge, the slow provide continuity and constraint./findings/0654/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0654/The unit of analysis for us isn’t the building, it’s the use of the building through time. Time is the essence of the real design problem./findings/0655/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0655/Always try to do the most with the least—with the emphasis on try. You may not always succeed, but attempt to produce the greatest effect in the viewer’s mind by the least number of things on screen. Why? Because you want to do only what is necessary to engage the imagination of the audience—suggestion is always more effective than exposition./findings/0656/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0656/An ideal cut (for me) is the one that satisfies all the following six criteria at once: 1) it is true to the emotion of the moment; 2) it advances the story; 3) it occurs at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and “right”; 4) it acknowledges what you might call “eye-trace”—the concern with the location and movement of the audience’s focus of interest within the frame; 5) it respects “planarity”—the grammar of three dimensions transposed by photography to two (the questions of stage-line, etc./findings/0657/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0657/It is frequently at the edges of things that we learn most about the middle: ice and steam can reveal more about the nature of water than water alone ever could./findings/0658/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0658/The relationship between director and editor is somewhat similar in that the director is generally the dreamer and the editor is the listener./findings/0659/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0659/You are being paid to make decisions, and as far as whether to cut or not, the editor is actually making twenty-four decisions a second: “No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Yes!”/findings/0660/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0660/a joy that wasn’t and isn’t and won’t be words./findings/0661/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0661/Consider a sculptor attacking granite with hand tools. Granite resists such attack violently; it is a hard material, so hard it is difficult to do anything bad in it. It is not easy to do something good, but it is extremely difficult to do something bad. Plastilina, though, is a different matter. In this spineless material it is extraordinarily easy to do something bad–one can do any imaginable variety of bad without half trying./findings/0662/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0662/Corita became known as the “joyous revolutionary.”/findings/0663/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0663/History has shown that virtually anything from everyday life can be used as a source for our image making. Campbell’s Soup is a long way from the caves of Lascaux, but we still are painting what we see. Look at today’s landscape–billboards, freeway systems, electric power plants (most beautiful at night), and so forth–to see how they can become art./findings/0664/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0664/I had a wonderful art teacher, she said. She didn’t teach us how to draw or paint so much as she taught us to care./findings/0665/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0665/I think celebrations are always meant to instruct and inspire, to empower people to use their own creative skills through images and ritual to action./findings/0666/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0666/It does not matter that this is all familiar territory–the same house, the same rug and chair. To the child, the journey of this particular day, with its special light and sound, has never been made before./findings/0667/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0667/One purpose of art is to alert people to things they might have missed./findings/0668/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0668/The artist has so much love to give back to the universe that it spills over, and the fallen drops become ‘works of art.’ It is love in another form./findings/0669/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0669/The commonplace is not worthless, there is simply lots of it./findings/0670/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0670/The root meaning of the word art is to fit together and we all do this every day. Not all of us are painters but we are all artists. Each time we fit things together we are creating–whether it is to make a loaf of bread, a child, a day./findings/0671/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0671/There are mornings when the sun pours in and the sky is that kind of blue you know you’ve never seen before. And the quality of the white clouds floating and the geraniums blooming indoors and the floor and carpets and all the colors and shapes are new too. These moments are very intense because you can hardly believe that this beauty exists every day when you are going faster or you have your back turned to it./findings/0672/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0672/The intuitive appeal of a scientific theory has to do with how well its metaphors fit one’s experience./findings/0673/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0673/A good parent creates an adult who can make his own choices, even disastrous choices./findings/0674/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0674/Each generation of human beings both grows up in and creates a slightly different world than the generation that preceded them. It’s a mess. But it’s a good mess, a mess that allows human beings to thrive in a staggering array of constantly changing environments./findings/0675/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0675/Every generation or so the idea of guiltless sex reemerges with a hopeful new name—free love or open marriage or now polyamory—and with the same hopeless old problems of insecurity and jealousy./findings/0676/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0676/In one of those bitter, teeth-gritting ironies, it turned out that moms used generics even when they were trying to combat sexism. Saying “Girls can drive trucks” still implies that girls all belong in the same category with the same deep, underlying essence./findings/0677/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0677/It turns out instead that even the youngest children look below the surface to try to understand the deeper essences of the things around them. In fact, when children make mistakes, it’s often because they are looking too hard for essences when there are actually none to be found./findings/0678/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0678/None of my children has replicated my life. Instead, each of them has created a uniquely valuable life of his own—a life that is a mash-up of my values and traditions, the values and traditions of the other people who have taught and cared for them, the inventions of their generation, and their own inventions./findings/0679/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0679/Parents in these communities slow down and exaggerate their own actions, and act in a way that makes it easy for the children to join in. But they don’t design special actions or do special things in order to teach the children—they act in order to get things done, and the children learn at the same time./findings/0680/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0680/Passing on rituals seems to be as important in cultural evolution as passing on technologies. In fact, you might argue that rituals are technologies./findings/0681/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0681/Studies by the neuroscientist B. J. Casey suggest that adolescents are reckless not because they underestimate risks but because they overestimate rewards—or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do./findings/0682/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0682/The evolutionary theorist Eva Jablonka has suggested that the human mind is more like a hand than a Swiss Army knife. A human hand isn’t designed to do any one thing in particular. But it is an exceptionally flexible and effective device for doing many things, including things we might never have imagined./findings/0683/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0683/The fact that the children were so sensitive to the teacher’s intentions made them stupid, or at least stupider than they would have been otherwise. Or to put it another way, their intelligence about teaching, and their cleverness in figuring out just what the teacher wanted, made them worse at actually learning./findings/0684/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0684/The new generation, in turn, will consciously alter those earlier practices and invent new ones. They can take the entire past for granted as they move toward the future./findings/0685/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0685/There is good reason to think that letting children play—spontaneously, randomly, and by themselves—helps allow them to learn. But another part of the evolutionary story is that play is a satisfying good in itself—a source of joy, laughter, and fun for parents as well as children. If it had no other rationale, the sheer pleasure of play would be justification enough./findings/0686/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0686/Virginia Woolf, who chose not to have children, wisely said, “Never pretend that the things you haven’t got are not worth having.”/findings/0687/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0687/We parents, and grandparents even more, have to watch our beloved children glide irretrievably into the future we can never reach ourselves./findings/0688/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0688/What makes us love a child isn’t something about the child—it’s something about us. We don’t care for children because we love them; we love them because we care for them./findings/0689/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0689/What Yeats called “perfection of the life or of the work”—these values can’t simply be weighed in some single objective scale./findings/0690/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0690/When we say that preschoolers are bad at paying attention, what we really mean is that they’re bad at not paying attention—they have difficulty keeping themselves from being drawn to distractions./findings/0691/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0691/The regime uses biblical symbols, as any authoritarian regime taking over America doubtless would: they wouldn’t be Communists or Muslims./findings/0692/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0692/As foresters like to say, the forest creates its own ideal habitat./findings/0693/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0693/If you read the professional literature, you quickly get the impression that the well-being of the forest is only of interest insofar as it is necessary for optimizing the lumber industry./findings/0694/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0694/The overall form of the tree, with its many upward thrusting branches, is like the shape of any one of its leaves./findings/0695/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0695/It was only with the advent of words, with the illusion that he could name the whole world, every last corner of it labeled and known, that the unknown became an enemy, became a threat./findings/0696/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0696/Prescriptive technologies eliminate the occasions for decision-making and judgement in general and especially for the making of principled decisions./findings/0697/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0697/Because life is short, human beings must cram into the years the highest possible amount of consciousness, alertness, and chronic insomnia so as to be sure not to miss the last fragment of startling pleasure./findings/0698/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0698/For the animal to be happy it is enough that this moment be enjoyable./findings/0699/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0699/For the perishability and changefulness of the world is part and parcel of its liveliness and loveliness. This is why the poets are so often at their best when speaking of change./findings/0700/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0700/He was finally about to find himself. But he would do it in the strangest way, by declaring that there was no self to find./findings/0701/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0701/If a problem can be solved at all, to understand it and to know what to do about it are the same thing./findings/0702/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0702/If psychic phenomena exist, there is no reason to suppose that they cannot be studied scientifically, and that they are not simply another aspect of “nature.”/findings/0703/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0703/Part of man’s frustration is that he has become accustomed to expect language and thought to offer explanations which they cannot give. To want life to be “intelligible” in this sense is to want it to be something other than life./findings/0704/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0704/Plucking chrysanthemums along the East fence; Gazing in silence at the southern hills; The birds flying home in pairs Through the soft mountain air of dusk— In these things there is a deep meaning, But when we are about to express it, We suddenly forget the words./findings/0705/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0705/Religious ideas are like words—of little use, and often misleading, unless you know the concrete realities to which they refer. The word “water” is a useful means of communication amongst those who know water. The same is true of the word and the idea called “God.”/findings/0706/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0706/Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain./findings/0707/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0707/The common error of ordinary religious practice is to mistake the symbol for the reality, to look at the finger pointing the way and then to suck it for comfort rather than follow it./findings/0708/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0708/The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath./findings/0709/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0709/The moment I name it, it is no longer God; it is man, tree, green, black, red, soft, hard, long, short, atom, universe./findings/0710/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0710/The pain is no longer problematic. I feel it, but there is no urge to get rid of it, for I have discovered that pain and the effort to be separate from it are the same thing. Wanting to get out of pain is the pain;/findings/0711/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0711/The scientific way of symbolizing the world is more suited to utilitarian purposes than the religious way, but this does not mean that it has any more “truth.” Is it truer to classify rabbits according to their meat or according to their fur? It depends on what you want to do with them. The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually “grasp” reality./findings/0712/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0712/This is why all philosophical and theological systems must ultimately fall apart. To “know” reality you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it, and feel it./findings/0713/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0713/This moving, vital now/findings/0714/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0714/To define has come to mean almost the same thing as to understand. More important still, words have enabled man to define himself—to label a certain part of his experience “I.”/findings/0715/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0715/We are at war within ourselves—the brain desiring things which the body does not want, and the body desiring things which the brain does not allow; the brain giving directions which the body will not follow, and the body giving impulses which the brain cannot understand./findings/0716/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0716/We are perpetually frustrated because the verbal and abstract thinking of the brain gives the false impression of being able to cut loose from all finite limitations. It forgets that an infinity of anything is not a reality but an abstract concept,/findings/0717/Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0717/What is true and positive is too real and too living to be described, and to try to describe it is like putting red paint on a red rose./findings/0618/Thu, 03 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0618/Principles without sacrifice are easy./findings/0616/Sat, 29 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0616/“I never understood her,” he admits. “And I didn’t ever feel like she was being honest or expressing her feelings my whole life. As she was getting older, I begged her: Show your children who you are, because we want to know before you die. She couldn’t do it. So now she’s still just an unfinished person for me.” He rubs his eyes and his spirit seems to lighten, as if suddenly struck with a pleasant memory./findings/0617/Sat, 29 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0617/Your kids… They don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are./findings/0615/Tue, 18 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0615/It is logic and beauty working against each other that makes things progress. My calligraphy teacher used to say that in the history of writing, the mind and the eye are the conservative forces, and the hand is the radical element that would rather be scratching out something with a stick./findings/0614/Sun, 16 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0614/This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it./findings/0613/Mon, 10 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0613/He saw the physical reality of labor as being, simultaneously, a necessity, an injustice, and the essence of humanity throughout history. The artist’s creative act was for him only one among many such acts. He believed that reality could best be approached through work, precisely because reality itself was a form of production./findings/0591/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0591/When you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you invent the plane crash; & when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution. Every technology carries its own negativity, invented at the same time as technical progress./findings/0592/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0592/What I find far more ominous is how seldom, today, we see the phrase “the 22nd century”/findings/0594/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0594/Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have./findings/0593/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0593/Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials./findings/0595/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0595/When we’re gone, they’ll put the year we were born, and the year we passed on our grave. In between, this life, will be marked by a dash./findings/0596/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0596/Strange to think these daily rhythms constitute a life/findings/0597/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0597/We are imperfect lenses trying to resolve our influences onto a new screen, and the mistakes we make in copying we call originality./findings/0598/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0598/One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real./findings/0599/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0599/Be ruthless with systems, be kind with people./findings/0600/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0600/A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable./findings/0601/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0601/An autumn leaf, very crisp, fell somewhere in the dark. But it was only the page of a book, turning./findings/0603/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0603/Children aren’t conscious of wanting to run. They’re only aware of wanting to get somewhere quickly./findings/0604/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0604/Our job as creators is to further define any medium./findings/0605/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0605/There is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe; to say “the jaguar” is to say all the jaguars that engendered it, the deer & turtles it devoured, the grass that fed the deer, the earth that was mother to the grass, the sky that gave light to the earth./findings/0606/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0606/The only true paradise is always the paradise we have lost./findings/0607/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0607/It is better to say ‘I’m suffering,’ than to say, ‘This landscape is ugly.’/findings/0608/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0608/One of the most satisfying aspects of writing code, for me: Telling a computer to do something, and having it follow your command so literally that it actually reveals to you that the problem you were trying to solve was much more complex than you had originally imagined./findings/0609/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0609/How long does it take to make the woods? As long as it takes to make the world. It is always finished, it is always being made, the act of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction./findings/0611/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0611/There isn’t anyone you couldn’t love once you’ve heard their story./findings/0612/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0612/Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself./findings/0602/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0602/if science is about solving the worlds problems, then maybe art is about accepting them/findings/0610/Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0610/how terrifying and wonderful that you will never be what you once were/findings/0587/Fri, 31 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0587/Simplicity is not an end in art, but we usually arrive at simplicity as we approach the true sense of things./findings/0588/Fri, 31 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0588/The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude./findings/0589/Fri, 31 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0589/For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life./findings/0590/Fri, 31 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0590/This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body./findings/0586/Thu, 30 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0586/In California, every­thing is green! Not just one green, but all of them./findings/0580/Tue, 28 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0580/It makes sense that, having grown up doing everything on a computer, Gen Z-ers have a fuller understanding of the digital universe than analog dinosaurs do. The dinosaurs can say, “You don’t know what you’re missing,” but Gen Z-ers can say, “You don’t understand what you’re getting.”/findings/0581/Tue, 28 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0581/And then it is another day and another and another, but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time./findings/0582/Tue, 28 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0582/Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet./findings/0583/Tue, 28 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0583/There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin./findings/0584/Tue, 28 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0584/They look at my paintings and say, “My four-year-old could’ve done that.” And I say, “Yes. But could you?”/findings/0585/Tue, 28 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0585/Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions./findings/0579/Tue, 21 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0579/To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now./findings/0576/Sun, 19 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0576/It must be emphasised again and again that freedom does not involve spoiling the child. If a baby of three wants to walk over the table, you simply tell him he must not. He must obey, that’s true. But on the other hand, you must obey when necessary. I get out of small children’s rooms if they tell me to get out/findings/0577/Sun, 19 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0577/When I noted that he was a sponge for quotations, he turned grave and said, “I’m not a religious person, but I think I’ve concocted my own book of hymns.”/findings/0578/Sun, 19 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0578/At Summerhill, play belongs to the child. We do not dress up learning situations so that the play will be “productive”, we do not look on and evaluate what they might learn form this or that game. Our children just play — and they can do it pretty well all day if they want to./findings/0574/Sat, 18 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0574/“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on,” he wrote. “Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting.” /findings/0575/Sat, 18 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0575/The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet all the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb./findings/0572/Sat, 18 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0572/One of the things white people gave us when they gave us integration was full access to the tormenting reality of desire, and the expectation of constant consumption./findings/0573/Sat, 18 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0573/Wounded white people frequently can cover up their wounds, because they have greater access to material power./findings/0571/Fri, 05 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0571/Many think of punk as a style or a category or a thing, but it’s much more interesting if you think of it as a process, a way of doing things, a disposition, a spirit. (This is probably true of all movements.)/findings/0570/Sat, 02 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0570/The question is not what you look at, but what you see./findings/0569/Fri, 01 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0569/Start by learning to recognize what interests you. Most people have been taught that what they notice doesn’t matter, So they never learn how to notice, Not even what interests them. Or they assume that the world has been completely pre-noticed, Already sifted and sorted and categorized By everyone else, by people with real authority. And so they write about pre-authorized subjects in pre-authorized language./findings/0568/Thu, 12 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0568/Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it./findings/0567/Fri, 06 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0567/They are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer, in every novel I read during and after his stay, on anything from the smell of rosemary on hot days to the frantic rattle of the cicadas in the afternoon—smells and sounds I’d grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the events of that summer./findings/0566/Sat, 24 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0566/The secret of The Old Farmer’s Almanac: pay attention. Pay attention to the sky, and the winds, and the tides, and the number of acorns on the ground in the fall, and what the animals are doing, and which way the birds are flying. Pay attention./findings/0565/Sat, 03 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0565/I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important./findings/0564/Sun, 27 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0564/One day it occurred to me that everything doesn’t happen for a reason. What it is is that everything happens, and then we assign a reason to it./findings/0563/Fri, 25 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0563/To Love Someone Long-Term Is to Attend a Thousand Funerals of the People They Used to Be/findings/0562/Sat, 19 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0562/Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood./findings/0560/Sun, 06 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0560/My pictures are collages. I didn’t invent the collage. […] Many children have done collages at home or in their classrooms. In fact, some children have said to me, “Oh, I can do that.” I consider that the highest compliment./findings/0561/Sun, 06 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0561/For Annie, who also knows the days to be gods/findings/0557/Sun, 25 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0557/“The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals,” Heschel writes. “Jewish ritual may be characterized as the art of significant forms in time, as architecture of time.”/findings/0558/Sun, 25 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0558/We have invented the weekend, but the dark cloud of old taboos still hangs over the holiday, and the combination of the secular with the holy leaves us uneasy. This tension only compounds the guilt that many of us continue to feel about not working, and leads to the nagging feeling that our free time should be used for some purpose higher than having fun. We want leisure, but we are afraid of it, too./findings/0559/Sun, 25 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0559/“Cherish, conserve, consider, create”: you could do worse than to live your life according to the principles propounded by the composer Lou Harrison./findings/0556/Sat, 10 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0556/It seems to me that the most pleasing thing you can find yourself saying in a conversation is something you haven’t said before./findings/0555/Sat, 03 Apr 2021 20:23:28 +0000/findings/0555/I think that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them do it, getting the children to agree that it is indeed a world. Each new generation of children has to be told: ‘This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.’ Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: ‘This is not a world, this is nothing, there’s no way to live at all./findings/0554/Sat, 27 Mar 2021 08:39:48 +0000/findings/0554/There will always be pigeons in books and in museums, but these are effigies and images, dead to all hardships and to all delights. They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all./findings/0553/Mon, 25 Jan 2021 20:49:56 +0000/findings/0553/The most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind./findings/0552/Sun, 27 Dec 2020 10:24:40 +0000/findings/0552/We are always, at all times, the people we were and the people we are going to be./findings/0551/Tue, 22 Dec 2020 08:25:01 +0000/findings/0551/It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique./findings/0550/Sat, 05 Dec 2020 09:05:24 +0000/findings/0550/Now might be a good time to remind everyone that the easiest way to discriminate is to make stringent rules, then to decide when and for whom to enforce them./findings/0549/Thu, 26 Nov 2020 16:59:33 +0000/findings/0549/You can’t hold the world in your head. Better to acknowledge the difficulty, though, than succumb to the abstractions./findings/0548/Sat, 12 Sep 2020 18:33:40 +0000/findings/0548/In the history of Art, unlike the history of Science, though there are periods of flowering and sterility, there is no such thing as Progress, only Change./findings/0547/Sat, 27 Jun 2020 07:05:42 +0000/findings/0547/For me it is enough to have the first and the last word — the middle we can discuss./findings/0546/Sat, 13 Jun 2020 16:45:27 +0000/findings/0546/What makes life worth living? No child asks itself that question. To children life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until that happens, until a distance appears between what they are and what the world is, does the question arise: what makes life worth living?/findings/0545/Mon, 25 May 2020 16:22:43 +0000/findings/0545/Many things in the world around me seem to me ugly, wasteful, foolish, cruel, destructive, and wicked. How much of this should I talk to children about? I tend to feel, not much. I prefer to let, or help, children explore as much of the world as they can, and then make up their own minds about it. If they ask me what I think about something, I will tell them./findings/0544/Mon, 25 May 2020 16:21:45 +0000/findings/0544/Learn all you can on your own before you spend any money on a school./findings/0543/Mon, 25 May 2020 16:09:11 +0000/findings/0543/A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can’t believe how ignorant you were a year earlier./findings/0542/Wed, 29 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0542/Make the most beautiful thing you can. Try to do that every day. That’s it. What are you working for, posterity? We don’t know if there is any posterity./findings/0541/Thu, 30 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0541/One of the more agreeable symmetries in design work is that consistency and laziness often lead you to the same solution. If software developers have a crucial lesson for designers, it is to exploit this situation to the fullest extent possible, then use the saved time to get into bread baking or something./findings/0540/Wed, 22 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0540/Learn to draw. If you don’t, you’re gonna live your life getting around that and trying to compensate./findings/0538/Sat, 11 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0538/“When I think I’m teaching, I’m probably not,” he said. “When I don’t think I’m teaching, I probably am.”/findings/0539/Sat, 11 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0539/It’s hard for me to throw anything away without thinking about how it can become part of some work I’m doing. I just stare at something and say: Why isn’t that art? Why couldn’t that be art?/findings/0534/Sat, 04 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0534/If plants grow and thrive, he should be happy; and if the plants which thrive chance not to be the ones which he planted, they are plants nevertheless, and nature is satisfied with them. We are apt to covet the things which we cannot have; but we are happier when we love the things which grow because they must./findings/0535/Sat, 04 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0535/Little children love the dandelions; why may not we? Love the things nearest at hand; and love intensely./findings/0536/Sat, 04 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0536/It’s easy to forget that we only ever see facets of other people, never the whole (not even in marriage) — and in those facets what we’re mostly seeing is some aspect of ourselves./findings/0537/Sat, 04 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0537/I write nonfiction because I don’t understand life well enough to make things up./findings/0533/Fri, 22 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0533/Grant yourself the superpower of making “art” wherever you go, and see how that changes what you perceive. Art is everywhere, if you say so./findings/0532/Sat, 05 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0532/He said that unconditional acceptance was “loving someone into existence.”/findings/0531/Fri, 27 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0531/No one is coming to the rescue. We have to save each other. Every day, in small and great ways./findings/0530/Tue, 20 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0530/You don’t get to hate it unless you love it./findings/0529/Mon, 19 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0529/And years from now — years after this moment — they’ll be sitting together at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning, laughing at something on the radio. He’ll tell her, out of the blue — for the first time in years — that he loves her. And she’ll feel tears in her eyes in an instant, in a gorgeous swell of grateful relief in her belly, knots unfasting she’d forgotten were even there./findings/0528/Thu, 18 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0528/The beginnings of articulating taste are almost always through discovering what you don’t like./findings/0527/Tue, 02 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0527/The most ridiculous thing about living is that childhood is its own eternity and then suddenly you’re an adult./findings/0526/Fri, 07 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0526/[Ideas] are not inside you, unable to get out; rather, they are outside of you, unable to get in./findings/0525/Sun, 19 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0525/The younger girl begins to sag under the weight of all the waiting and the lateness, the way small children do./findings/0524/Thu, 11 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0524/Follow the rules exactly unless you come up with something better./findings/0523/Mon, 08 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0523/“Time goes too quickly” is a belief system. Like all belief systems, the more you believe that it’s true, the more true it becomes./findings/0522/Sat, 06 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0522/We measure time by its deaths, yes, and by its births. For time is told also by life. As some depart, others come. The hand opened in farewell remains open in welcome. I, who once had grandparents and parents, now have children and grandchildren. Like the flowing river that is yet always present, time that is always going is always coming. And time that is told by death and birth is held and redeemed by love, which is always present./findings/0521/Sat, 06 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0521/We are encouraged to believe in our dreams, but we are assumed to dream in the same limited palette as everyone else./findings/0519/Sat, 16 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0519/Dolly Parton once said that her advice to anyone wanting to be an artist was to “Find out who you are and then be that on purpose.” Or something like that. As I’ve gotten older, those are the people I find myself drawn to work with and stay close to. People who have figured out who they are and are good at being that on purpose./findings/0520/Sat, 16 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0520/Stay woke just means pay attention to everything, don’t lean on your own understanding or anyone else’s, observe, evolve, eliminate things that no longer evolve. That’s what it means. Stay conscious, stay awake. It doesn’t mean judge others. It doesn’t mean gang up on somebody who you feel is not woke./findings/0518/Fri, 08 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0518/Proof of God? Proof was in the world, and the way you visited the world was on foot…. Your walking was a devotion./findings/0517/Thu, 23 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0517/At the same time that “self-made” entered the nation’s lexicon, so did the notion of abject failure. Once reserved to describe a discrete financial episode — “I made a failure,” a merchant would say after losing his shop — “failure” in antebellum America became a matter of identity, describing not an event but a person. As the historian Scott Sandage explains in Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, the phrase “I feel like a failure” comes to us so naturally today “that we forget it is a figure of speech: the language of business applied to the soul./findings/0502/Sun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0502/When you die, you are grieved by all the atoms of which you were composed./findings/0503/Sun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0503/“Perhaps we could warm you up with a simpler situation,” he considers. “How would you like to be in a closed room, one-on-one with your lover?” And then you are here. You are simultaneously engaged in her conversation and thinking about something else; she both gives herself to you and does not give herself to you; you find her objectionable and you deeply love her; she worships you and wonders what she might have missed with someone else./findings/0504/Sun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0504/In the afterlife, in the warm company of His accidental subjects, God now settles in comfortably, like a grandfather who looks down the long holiday table at his progeny, feeling proud, somehow responsible, and a little surprised./findings/0505/Sun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0505/God created life in His own image; His congregations are the microbes./findings/0506/Sun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0506/Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way, like the problem of cause and effect. Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together./findings/0507/Sun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0507/You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, “Now, I’ve arrived!” Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now./findings/0508/Sun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0508/Women are slaves to the fashion game with its basic rule, “I have conformed sooner than you.”/findings/0509/Sun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0509/Nothing unites a community so much as common cause against an external enemy, yet, in the same moment, that enemy becomes the essential support of social unity. Therefore larger societies require larger enemies, bringing us in due course to the perilous point of our present situation, where the world is virtually divided into two huge camps./findings/0510/Sun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0510/At times, the paper-work, recording what has been done, seems to become more important than what it records. Students’ records in the registrar’s office are often kept in safes and vaults, but not so the books in the library—unless extremely rare or dangerous./findings/0511/Sun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0511/I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life./findings/0512/Sun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0512/There is a notion that creative people are absentminded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true./findings/0513/Sun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0513/Man’s most agonizing spiritual dilemma is his necessity for food, with its unavoidable attachments to suffering./findings/0514/Sun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0514/For the universe is full of radiant suggestion./findings/0515/Sun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0515/I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses./findings/0516/Sun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0516/Attention is the beginning of devotion./findings/0439/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0439/Titles by their nature imply that the play’s architecture is like a bull’s-eye (and some are) with the point being in the center. Sometimes the point is in the margins, or in the experience of throwing the dart./findings/0440/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0440/I do believe that thinking is an overrated medium for achieving thought./findings/0441/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0441/Perhaps we have lost the guiding force of form; we live in the age of prose. Everything is goop./findings/0442/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0442/Why is it so horrible to see certain professionalized child actors on stage? Is it because they are in a state of premature work rather than in a state of play?/findings/0443/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0443/Recently, my son said to me after seeing a ballet on television: “It’s beautiful but I don’t like it.” And I thought, Are many grown-ups capable of such a distinction? It’s beautiful, but I don’t like it. Usually, our grown-up thinking is more along the lines of: I don’t like it, so it’s not beautiful./findings/0444/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0444/The world is a comedy made up of lots of individual tragedies./findings/0445/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0445/One is reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s remark on his first seeing the glittering neon signs of Broadway and 42nd Street at night. It must be beautiful, he said, if you cannot read./findings/0446/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0446/What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer./findings/0447/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0447/Men always make their gods in their own image./findings/0448/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0448/In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours./findings/0449/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0449/Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles?/findings/0450/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0450/It is an argument that fixes its attention on the forms of human conversation, and postulates that how we are obliged to conduct such conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express. And what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of a culture./findings/0451/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0451/A person who reads a book or who watches television or who glances at his watch is not usually interested in how his mind is organized and controlled by these events, still less in what idea of the world is suggested by a book, television, or a watch./findings/0452/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0452/Truth, like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented./findings/0453/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0453/Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations./findings/0454/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0454/To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them./findings/0455/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0455/The words “true” and “false” come from the universe of language, and no other./findings/0456/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0456/Like telegraphy, photography recreates the world as a series of idiosyncratic events. There is no beginning, middle, or end in a world of photographs, as there is none implied by telegraphy. The world is atomized./findings/0457/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0457/There is no audience so young that it is barred from television. There is no poverty so abject that it must forgo television. There is no education so exalted that it is not modified by television./findings/0458/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0458/What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us./findings/0459/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0459/As Sartre argued in his 1943 review of The Stranger, basic phenomenological principles show that experience comes to us already charged with significance. A piano sonata is a melancholy evocation of longing. If I watch a soccer match, I see it as a soccer match, not as a meaningless scene in which a number of people run around taking turns to apply their lower limbs to a spherical object. If the latter is what I’m seeing, then I am not watching some more essential, truer version of soccer; I am failing to watch it properly as soccer at all./findings/0460/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0460/Sartre examined a character, Lucien, who shores up an identity for himself as an anti-Semite mainly in order to be something. He is pleased when he hears someone else say of him, ‘Lucien can’t stand Jews.’ It gives him the illusion that he simply is the way he is. Bad faith here makes an entity out of a nonentity./findings/0461/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0461/Girls come to think of themselves as ‘positioned in space’ rather than as defining or constituting the space around them by their movements./findings/0462/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0462/We have to do two near-impossible things at once: understand ourselves as limited by circumstances, and yet continue to pursue our projects as though we are truly in control./findings/0463/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0463/I am a psychological and historical structure./findings/0464/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0464/All of us are constantly discussing the child we were, and are./findings/0465/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0465/Merleau-Ponty, in his pro-Soviet phase, asked him what he would do if he had to choose between two events, one of which would kill 300 people and the other 3,000. What difference was there, philosophically speaking? Sartre replied that there was a mathematical difference, of course, but not a philosophical one, for each individual is an infinite universe in his or her own eyes, and one cannot compare one infinity with another./findings/0466/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0466/I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing. They made no honey, those things, they can provide no one with any nourishment./findings/0467/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0467/Everything takes place under a kind of anaesthesia. Objectively dreadful events produce a thin, puny emotional response./findings/0468/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0468/They crossed to Czechoslovakia (then still safe) by a method that sounds almost too fabulous to be true: a sympathetic German family on the border had a house with its front door in Germany and its back door in Czechoslovakia./findings/0469/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0469/There is a part of everything that remains unexplored, for we have fallen into the habit of remembering, whenever we use our eyes, what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at./findings/0470/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0470/To describe a blazing fire or a tree in a plain, we must remain before that fire or that tree until they no longer resemble for us any other tree or any other fire./findings/0471/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0471/He insisted on being nice to everyone. ‘I feel myself to be so different!’ she cried. She was a creature of strong judgements, while he looked for multiple sides to any situation. He considered people a mixture of qualities, and liked to give them the benefit of the doubt, whereas in youth she saw humanity as consisting of ‘a small band of the chosen in a great mass of people unworthy of consideration’./findings/0472/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0472/What is so detestable about war is that it reduces the individual to complete insignificance./findings/0473/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0473/A certain number of years lived without money are enough to create a whole sensibility./findings/0474/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0474/Camus concludes his book with Sisyphus resuming his endless task while resigning himself to its absurdity. Thus: ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’/findings/0475/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0475/Heidegger ‘states the obvious in a way that even philosophers can grasp’./findings/0476/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0476/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./findings/0477/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0477/A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls./findings/0478/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0478/Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes./findings/0479/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0479/Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have./findings/0480/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0480/Spider-webs of intricate relationships seeking a form/findings/0481/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0481/As time passes the roles, too, are no longer exactly the same as before; certainly the action they carry forward through intrigues and surprises leads toward some final denouement, which it continues to approach even when the plot seems to thicken more and more and the obstacles increase. If you look into the square in successive moments, you hear how from act to act the dialogue changes, even if the lives of Melania’s inhabitants are too short for them to realize it./findings/0482/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0482/There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name./findings/0483/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0483/If you ask, “Why is Thekla’s construction taking such a long time?” the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer, “So that its destruction cannot begin.”/findings/0484/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0484/It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear./findings/0485/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0485/The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past./findings/0486/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0486/To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once./findings/0487/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0487/You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she’d been and the child she’d become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously./findings/0488/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0488/Did you have to burn down the old to make way for the new?/findings/0489/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0489/Anything had the potential to transform, and this, to her, seemed the true meaning of art./findings/0490/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0490/It had been a long time since her daughter had let her be so close. Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less./findings/0491/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0491/[She] had — even before the nurses had wiped the baby clean, even before they had cut the cord — touched every part of her child, her tiny flaring nostrils and the faint shadows of her eyebrows and the womb-slicked soles of her feet, making certain she was wholly present, learning her by heart./findings/0492/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0492/Mrs. Richardson, who had always been so kind to her, who had said so many nice things about her. Whose shining, polished surface had entranced Pearl with her own reflection./findings/0493/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0493/She smelled, Mia thought suddenly, of home, as if home had never been a place, but had always been this little person whom she’d carried alongside her./findings/0494/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0494/“You ready for this party, Pearl?” The answer, of course, was no./findings/0495/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0495/Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully./findings/0496/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0496/No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience./findings/0497/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0497/He considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected./findings/0498/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0498/Every child begins the world again, to some extent./findings/0499/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0499/I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust./findings/0500/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0500/But lo! men have become the tools of their tools./findings/0501/Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0501/I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well./findings/0438/Wed, 11 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0438/One day when my husband dropped him off, he heard a little girl stand up to a naysayer and shout, “Boys can like beautiful things, too!”/findings/0436/Tue, 10 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0436/In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing About the dark times./findings/0437/Tue, 10 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0437/How many are busy going elsewhere getting nowhere;/findings/0435/Sat, 24 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0435/There is no gulf between the stuff of daily life and the stuff of poetry, save that one is the raw material of the other…/findings/0434/Fri, 16 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0434/How does a city wish to be? Look to the library. A library is the gift a city gives to itself./findings/0433/Fri, 26 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0433/A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both./findings/0432/Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0432/It has always been curious to me that the first rule of improvisation is that you have to agree and the first rule of playwriting is that your characters have to disagree…/findings/0431/Thu, 18 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0431/Instead, we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry./findings/0429/Sat, 23 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0429/Billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk assume that a superintelligent AI will stop at nothing to achieve its goals because that’s the attitude they adopted./findings/0430/Sat, 23 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0430/Fights about artistic tastes are nearly always about submerged social hostilities — putting down the audiences as much as the artists./findings/0428/Sun, 03 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0428/If you’ve ever watched a television cartoon, you know that kids don’t appreciate subtlety, though perhaps that’s because they’re not often offered it./findings/0426/Thu, 02 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0426/The website of Zaha Hadid Architects brags that the buildings for a new project are “iconic in both their scale and ambition… creating a unique twisted, intertwined silhouette that punctures the skyline.” But architects should not want to create things that are “iconic in scale” or to “puncture the skyline.” This is precisely the wrong thing to care about; it suggests the architect simply craves attention rather than the creation of perfect beauty and comfort./findings/0427/Thu, 02 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0427/A shared egalitarian social undertaking, ideally, ought to be one of joy as well as struggle: in these desperate times, there are certainly more overwhelming imperatives than making the world beautiful to look at, but to decline to make the world more beautiful when it’s in your power to so, or to destroy some beautiful thing without need, is a grotesque perversion of the cooperative ideal./findings/0425/Sat, 28 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0425/To anyone who has spent time with an animal, the notion that they have no interior lives seems so counterintuitive, such an obdurate denial of the empathetically self-evident, as to be almost psychotic. I suspect that some of those same psychological mechanisms must have allowed people to rationalize owning other people./findings/0423/Sun, 22 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0423/Creative naturalism is the beautiful revenge of people who feel they’re being outrun by time and human opportunity: the real thing speeds past you, impervious, so you reconjure it on the screen, where you and everybody else can live in it forever./findings/0424/Sun, 22 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0424/In the end, the “Before” series embraces what we’d rather forget: every true love story is a story of bad timing./findings/0366/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0366/Depression is hard to describe not just because it is complex and abstract but also because it occupies the part of us capable of describing things./findings/0367/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0367/Why should I leave instructions? The ashes will be my family’s, not mine, the scattering their mnemonic for the idea of me./findings/0368/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0368/Talking with someone who reveals nothing, I hear myself madly filling the emptiness with information about myself./findings/0369/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0369/Faced with a camera lens, hideously overwitnessed, I immediately start trying to impersonate myself./findings/0370/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0370/Some people love only those they can condescend to, those they can tenderly despise./findings/0371/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0371/It’s interesting to watch my friend speak carefully about what he thinks I’ll find interesting./findings/0372/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0372/If you can’t be with the one you love, my friend says, love the one who looks like the one you love. Other people call this having a type. It’s an expression of grief for an original loss./findings/0373/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0373/Mothers must have sung to their babies before there was such a thing as music. I wonder what they thought of it, how they understood it, that singing./findings/0374/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0374/After I submitted the final draft of my book about a train-track suicide, the art department produced sketches for my book cover: a needle and a long skein of red thread; a length of fluffy pinkish lace; a yellow hand mirror lying on a patch of green grass. I gave my editor a note for the designers, and the next day they delivered a perfect cover design: a photograph of the book’s subject, a man sitting on a train./findings/0375/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0375/The trouble with setting goals is that you’re constantly working toward what you used to want./findings/0376/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0376/It can be worth forgoing marriage for sex, and it can be worth forgoing sex for marriage. It can be worth forgoing parenthood for work, and it can be worth forgoing work for parenthood. Every case is orthogonal to all the others. That’s the entire problem./findings/0377/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0377/It can’t be said too often: we get better at using words, whether hearing, speaking, reading, or writing, under one condition and only one–when we use those words to say something we want to say, to people we want to say it to, for purposes that are our own./findings/0378/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0378/Confronted with what we do not know, we try to protect ourselves by saying that it is not worth knowing./findings/0379/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0379/The anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied and into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don’t know./findings/0380/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0380/We can hardly ever hurt children by putting too much information within their reach./findings/0381/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0381/He finds it mysterious and exciting that the label that said FRUIT COCKTAIL yesterday still says it today–always says it. And indeed it is mysterious and exciting that, in writing, we should be able to freeze and preserve for as long as we want such perishable goods as thought and speech./findings/0382/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0382/Now and then he would say indignantly, “Too much peoples!” To which I could only agree./findings/0383/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0383/Pictures are flat; life has depth. The business of turning real objects into flat pictures is a convention, like language, and like language, it must be learned./findings/0384/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0384/The children, of course, were not drawing a tree but what they had learned to recognize as a symbol of a tree, almost like a large hieroglyph. The lines they put on the paper did not look to them like a tree; they meant tree./findings/0385/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0385/It seemed as if their schooling had been for so long so far removed from reality that they were no longer able to see reality, to grasp it, to come to grips with it./findings/0386/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0386/They see the world as a whole, mysterious perhaps, but a whole none the less. They do not divide it up into airtight little categories, as we adults tend to do./findings/0387/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0387/As I have since learned very well, little children strongly dislike being given more help than they ask for./findings/0388/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0388/Their curiosity grows by what it feeds on. Our task is to keep it well supplied with food./findings/0389/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0389/But children, at least before they meet the ready-made fantasies of TV, don’t want to be omnipotent. They just want not to be impotent. They want to be able to do what the bigger people around them do–read, write, go places, use tools and machines. Above all, they want, like the big people, to control their immediate physical lives, to stand, sit, walk, eat, and sleep where and when they want./findings/0390/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0390/We are seeing something new in human history, a generation or two of children who have most of their daydreams made for them./findings/0391/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0391/The two processes are, after all, the same; as we move farther and farther into the world, we take more and more of it into ourselves./findings/0392/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0392/All my fantasies did for me–no small thing–was to keep alive a feeling that the world is in many ways a fascinating and beautiful place./findings/0393/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0393/By now the art or science of giving complicated instructions to incredibly quick but still stupid machines has become the giant field of computer programming./findings/0394/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0394/The child is curious. He wants to make sense out of things, find out how things work, gain competence and control over himself and his environment, do what he can see other people doing. He is open, receptive, and perceptive. He does not shut himself off from the strange, confused, complicated world around him. He observes it closely and sharply, tries to take it all in. He is experimental. He does not merely observe the world around him, but tastes it, touches it, hefts it, bends it, breaks it./findings/0395/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0395/I never want to be where I cannot see it. All that energy and foolishness, all that curiosity, questions, talk, all those fierce passions, inconsolable sorrows, immoderate joys, seem to many a nuisance to be endured, if not a disease to be cured. To me they are a national asset, a treasure beyond price, more necessary to our health and our very survival than any oil or uranium or–name what you will./findings/0396/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0396/Gears, twigs, leaves, little children love the world. That is why they are so good at learning about it. For it is love, not tricks and techniques of thought, that lies at the heart of all true learning. Can we bring ourselves to let children learn and grow through that love?/findings/0397/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0397/A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that he sees bigger people doing. Why can’t we make more use of this great drive for understanding and competence?/findings/0398/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0398/It is probably a mistake, anyway, to assume that whatever little children touch they will destroy, and that we must therefore keep them from touching anything that is not theirs. This dampens their curiosity and confidence./findings/0399/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0399/She showed that very little children could easily be taught to move, not just exuberantly, but also deftly, precisely, gently./findings/0400/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0400/A child doesn’t work that way. He is used to getting his answers out of the noise. He has, after all, grown up in a strange world where everything is noise, where he can only understand and make sense of a tiny part of what he experiences./findings/0401/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0401/When we see a chair in a room, we can easily imagine that chair in another part of the room, or in another room, or by itself. But for the baby the chair is an integral part of the room he sees./findings/0402/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0402/Most of us are tactful enough with other adults not to point out their errors, but not many of us are ready to extend this courtesy (or any other courtesy, for that matter) to children./findings/0403/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0403/Bill Hull once said to me, “Who needs the most practice talking in school? Who gets the most?” Exactly. The children need it, the teacher gets it./findings/0404/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0404/His message could be summed up, You cannot learn anything about yourself from your own experience, but must believe whatever we experts tell you./findings/0405/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0405/In that respect, the movie marked a narrative angle that Linklater has repeatedly returned to: the personal historical present, a kind of Polaroid of the moment developed by a man farther along in time. We’re meant to be fully immersed in the world it portrays, but that world always exists relative to an offscreen future; we know where it leads, although the characters do not./findings/0406/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0406/Given the precision and the vagueness, you are forced to re-see the lilacs of your own experience./findings/0407/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0407/Imagine then what happens when somebody comes upon the silence of the Fayum faces and stops short. Images of men and women making no appeal whatsoever, asking for nothing, yet declaring themselves, and anybody who is looking at them, alive! They incarnate, frail as they are, a forgotten self-respect. They confirm, despite everything, that life was and is a gift./findings/0408/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0408/The images convincingly represent men, trees, hills, helmets, stones. And one knows that such things grow, develop, and have a life of their own, just as one knows that the acrobat can fall. Consequently, when here their forms are made to exist in perfect correspondence, you can only feel that all that has previously occurred to them, has occurred in preparation for this presented moment. Such a painting makes the present the apex of the whole past./findings/0409/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0409/I won’t make the same mistake again. I’ll make others, of course./findings/0410/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0410/Throughout history, there are always new terrors – even if a few disappear, yet there are no new happinesses – happiness is always the old one./findings/0411/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0411/They both want it understood that not to resist is to be indifferent, that to forget or not to know is also to be indifferent, and that to be indifferent is to condone./findings/0412/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0412/But what engaged Bellini was not light which, destroying darkness, enables us to distinguish one object from another; it was, rather, the way that, when light is diffused, it creates a unity of all the objects that it falls on./findings/0413/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0413/I do not want to suggest that I saw more in 1973 than in 1963. I saw differently. That is all./findings/0414/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0414/The Impressionist vocabulary of images is that of a popular dream, the awaited, beloved, secular Sunday./findings/0415/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0415/The sitter had not yet become a model, and the painter had not yet become a broker for future glory. Instead, the two of them, living at that moment, collaborated in a preparation for death, a preparation which would ensure survival. To paint was to name, and to be named was a guarantee of this continuity./findings/0416/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0416/Their love for God was based in their satisfaction with the status quo./findings/0417/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0417/Lines of force twist and elongate between people, objects, institutions, ideas. The individuals are tragically like marionettes, independently animate but bound by a web they choose not to see; they could resist if they wished, but so few of them do./findings/0418/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0418/I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life./findings/0419/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0419/I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy./findings/0420/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0420/But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires./findings/0421/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0421/The “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram — life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all./findings/0422/Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0422/We got rid of the day as well as we could./findings/0365/Fri, 13 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0365/The real issue with speed is not just how fast can you go, but where are you going so fast? It doesn’t help to arrive quickly if you wind up in the wrong place./findings/0364/Wed, 20 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0364/If you draw, the world becomes more beautiful, far more beautiful. Trees that used to be just scrub suddenly reveal their form. Animals that were ugly make you see their beauty. If you then go for a walk, you’ll be amazed how different everything can look. Less and less is ugly if every day you recognize beautiful forms in ugliness and learn to love them./findings/0363/Sun, 10 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0363/It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.”/findings/0362/Fri, 11 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0362/“I no longer love blue skies,” said Rehman, who was injured by shrapnel in the attack. “In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray.”/findings/0361/Fri, 04 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0361/Our relationship was not abusive; it was a fight, not a battle; it was a competition for the oxygen in the room./findings/0359/Thu, 06 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0359/What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment./findings/0360/Thu, 06 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0360/Almost everyone I know is busy. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.’s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications./findings/0358/Thu, 06 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0358/And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals./findings/0357/Thu, 29 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0357/While we use recipes to inspire us, we never abandon our senses. Chiefly, taste. Taste is everything./findings/0329/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0329/[On Van Gogh] A chair, a bed, a pair of boots. His act of painting them was far nearer than that of any other painter to the carpenter’s or the shoemaker’s act of making them./findings/0330/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0330/What I did not know when I was very young was that nothing can take the past away: the past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying./findings/0331/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0331/There is no way of comparing the time of the hare with that of the tortoise except by using an abstraction which has nothing to do with either./findings/0332/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0332/The principal function of painting, until recently, was to depict, to make as if continually present, what soon was to be absent./findings/0333/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0333/Physically his body, simplified by burning to the element of carbon, re-enters the physical process of the world./findings/0334/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0334/Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known. Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace./findings/0335/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0335/Yet poetry uses the same words, and more or less the same syntax as, say, the Annual General Report of a multinational corporation. (Corporations that prepare for their profit some of the most terrible battlefields of the modern world.) How then can poetry so transform language that, instead of simply communicating information, it listens and promises and fulfills the role of a god?/findings/0336/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0336/One’s death is already one’s own. It belongs to nobody else: not even to a killer. This means that it is already part of one’s life./findings/0337/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0337/A name and two dates, the last one precise to the very day. This is what is recorded. About what happened between, apart from the bare fact of survival, not a word is written./findings/0338/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0338/The masses, the required anonymous labor force, persist in remaining a population of individuals, despite their living and working conditions, despite their displacement./findings/0339/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0339/I have always thought that household gods were animals. Sometimes visible and sometimes invisible, but always present./findings/0340/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0340/Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest. They will place my hands like this. It will look as though I am flying into myself./findings/0341/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0341/I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself. … What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?/findings/0342/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0342/If we devote ourselves exclusively to modern literature—we get to think the world is progressing when it is only repeating itself./findings/0343/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0343/Local libraries “are often peopled with … students who can’t find a quiet place at home to work.… Denying these children the space and silence to study and contemplate the past that the better-off may be able to find in a spare room of their house is nothing short of social discrimination at its worst.” Leslie fears a return to a time “when only the elite could afford silence.”/findings/0344/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0344/For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don’t like it; I can see this is good, and, though at present I don’t like it, I believe with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don’t like it./findings/0345/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0345/No critic will ever amount to much who does not start with strong personal preferences and end by transcending them so that he can see the good in works which are not really his ‘dish.’/findings/0346/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0346/Once upon a time we chose none of our reading: it all came to us unbidden, unanticipated, unknown, and from the hand of someone who loved us./findings/0347/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0347/For many children the act of being read to—and therefore the book itself—is powerfully associated with being loved./findings/0348/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0348/Young people often signal through their pretensions what they hope to become: they have discerned, maybe in a limited way, some good and they are pursuing it as best they can, given limited knowledge and experience./findings/0349/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0349/The conventions called those appearances reality. Perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world./findings/0350/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0350/You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure./findings/0351/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0351/Hack work is not the result of either clumsiness or provincialism; it is the result of the market making more insistent demands than the art./findings/0352/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0352/The exotic and nostalgic attraction of the Mediterranean./findings/0353/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0353/The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life. Not with the way of life of society, but with his own within it./findings/0354/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0354/Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice. Publicity helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic within society./findings/0355/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0355/To be continued by the reader/findings/0356/Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0356/The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past./findings/0328/Sun, 18 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0328/Intelligence that’s not modulated and moderated by creativity, common sense and wisdom is not such a positive thing to have. What it leads to is people who are very good at advancing themselves, often at other people’s expense./findings/0327/Wed, 07 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0327/“Operation is subject to the following two conditions: (1) this device may not cause harmful interference, and (2) this device must accept any interference received, including interference that may cause undesired operation.” You see this on many electronic devices sold in the United States, and I think it’s actually a pleasingly crisp formulation of the “golden rule” in terms that make more explicit that such a rule mandates that you accept things from others that you yourself should not or are not allowed to do./findings/0326/Mon, 05 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0326/Obliviousness is privilege’s form of deprivation. When you don’t hear others, you don’t imagine them, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it, and that surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine others exist in any true deep way that matters./findings/0325/Wed, 24 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0325/Live, [pop music] can provide the kind of indelible, empowering experience that was so beautifully described by the American rock critic Ann Powers on social media in the aftermath of the Manchester attack: “Telling your mom it’s OK and you’ll meet her right after the show, running toward the front hand in hand with your best friend like you don’t even have a mom right now, flirting with the kid who sells you a soda, dancing experimentally, looking at the woman onstage and thinking maybe one day you’ll be sexy and confident like her, realising that right this moment you are sexy and confident like her, matching your voice to the sound, loving the sound, falling into the sound./findings/0324/Thu, 11 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0324/“Late capitalism” often seems more like “the latest in capitalism”/findings/0322/Wed, 26 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0322/A government no longer steers towards its chosen destination. The word “horizon”, with its promise of a hoped-for future, has vanished from political discourse - on both right and left. All that remains for debate is how to measure what is there. Opinion polls replace direction and replace desire./findings/0323/Wed, 26 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0323/The word we, when printed or pronounced on screens, has become suspect, for it’s continually used by those with power in the demagogic claim that they are also speaking for those who are denied power. Let’s talk of ourselves as they./findings/0321/Mon, 24 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0321/One of the most consoling aspects of animals is that their priorities have nothing whatsoever to do with our own perilous and tortured agendas. They are redemptively unconcerned with everything we are and want./findings/0320/Sat, 08 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0320/Sometimes it’s hard to draw a line between the specific and the trivial./findings/0318/Thu, 30 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0318/“I say I love writing, but really it is thinking I love – that rush of thoughts – new connections in the brain being made. And it comes out of the blue.” O smiled. “In such moments: I feel such love of the world, love of thinking…”/findings/0319/Thu, 30 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0319/The most we can do is to write – intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively – about what it is like living in the world at this time./findings/0317/Tue, 28 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0317/You can refine the normal into the sophisticated by pursuing clarity and consistency. Attentiveness turns the normal artful./findings/0316/Mon, 27 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0316/There’s a reason most people have “the one who got away”—and why that memory is usually pleasant, rather than painful, though it’s perhaps best left undisturbed. Maybe we don’t want to fulfil romantic fantasies, ultimately—we would rather settle for responsible companionship, with far less risk involved./findings/0312/Sat, 25 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0312/I don’t swear just for the hell of it. Language is a poor enough means of communication. I think we should all the words we’ve got. Besides, there are damn few words that anybody understands./findings/0313/Sat, 25 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0313/It is the duty of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable./findings/0314/Sat, 25 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0314/A giant once lived in that body. But Matt Brady got lost because he looked for God too high up and too far away./findings/0315/Sat, 25 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0315/“Why is it, my old friend, that you’ve moved so far away from me?” “All motion is relative, Matt. Maybe it’s you who’ve moved away by standing still.”/findings/0311/Fri, 24 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0311/ Go outside and walk in the direction that is the quietest. 2. Continue until you’re in the quietest place possible. 3. Take a moment to absorb it./findings/0310/Wed, 22 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0310/Like protons circling a nucleus, the kids grow into themselves but never quite disband from their parents, despite all that movement./findings/0309/Tue, 21 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0309/we will begin our story with the word and/findings/0308/Mon, 20 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0308/The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end./findings/0267/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0267/Byron Barton’s “Trucks” was a liturgy to us: “On the road — here come the trucks. They come through tunnels — they go over the bridge.” Those ageless granitic words, night after night, unforgettably./findings/0268/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0268/They blended into one another, not as a writer blends into his pseudonym, but as two writers develop their ideas in partnership — often arguing, often disagreeing, yet constantly absorbing./findings/0269/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0269/They also agreed that the best path to eudaimonia was ataraxia, which might be rendered as “imperturbability” or “freedom from anxiety.” Ataraxia means equilibrium: the art of maintaining an even keel, so that you neither exult when things go well nor plunge into despair when they go awry. To attain it is to have control over your emotions, so that you are not battered and dragged about by them like a bone fought over by a pack of dogs./findings/0270/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0270/Mindful attention is the trick that underlies many of the other tricks. It is a call to attend to the inner world—and thus also to the outer world, for uncontrolled emotion blurs reality as tears blur a view./findings/0271/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0271/Variation always solaces, dissolves, and dissipates. If I cannot combat it, I escape it; and in fleeing I dodge, I am tricky./findings/0272/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0272/This is because Montaigne borrows a technique from Plutarch: he constructs his argument by heaping up case studies. Stories and facts spill out in every paragraph like flowers from a cornucopia./findings/0273/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0273/All Montaigne’s skills at jumping between perspectives come to the fore when he writes about animals. We find it hard to understand them, he says, but they must find it just as hard to understand us. “This defect that hinders communication between them and us, why is it not just as much ours as theirs?”/findings/0274/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0274/He started with the Skeptical assumption that nothing was real, and that all his previous beliefs had been false. Then he advanced slowly, with careful steps, “like a man who walks alone, and in the dark,” replacing these false beliefs with logically justified ones./findings/0275/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0275/As Friedrich Nietzsche would remark centuries later, most of the genuinely valuable observations about human behavior and psychology—and thus also about philosophy—“were first detected and stated in those social circles which would make every sort of sacrifice not for scientific knowledge, but for a witty coquetry.”/findings/0276/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0276/He wrote that they had both decided she should be punished by nothing more than stern words, and even then, “very gentle ones.”/findings/0277/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0277/On a global scale, no single creature can be of much importance, he wrote, yet in another way these I’s are the only things of importance. And only a politics that recognizes them can offer hope for the future./findings/0278/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0278/Death is only a few bad moments at the end of life, he wrote in one of his last added notes; it is not worth wasting any anxiety over./findings/0279/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0279/“This great world,” writes Montaigne, “is the mirror in which we must look at ourselves to recognize ourselves from the proper angle.”/findings/0280/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0280/The earth gives this natural man everything he needs. It does not pamper him, but he needs no pampering./findings/0281/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0281/The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity./findings/0282/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0282/Moderation sees itself as beautiful; it is unaware that in the eye of the immoderate it appears black and sober, and consequently ugly-looking./findings/0283/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0283/Renaissance readers fetishized extreme states: ecstasy was the only state in which to write poetry, just as it was the only way to fight a battle and the only way to fall in love. In all three pursuits, Montaigne seems to have had an inner thermostat which switched him off as soon as the temperature rose beyond a certain point./findings/0284/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0284/Mediocrity, for Montaigne, does not mean the dullness that comes from not bothering to think things through, or from lacking the imagination to see beyond one’s own viewpoint. It means accepting that one is like everyone else, and that one carries the entire form of the human condition./findings/0285/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0285/In a time such as that of the Second World War, or in civil-war France, Zweig writes, ordinary people’s lives are sacrificed to the obsessions of fanatics, so the question for any person of integrity becomes not so much “How do I survive?” as “How do I remain fully human?”/findings/0286/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0286/What he loved above all about his travels was the feeling of going with the flow. He avoided all fixed plans. “If it looks ugly on the right, I take the left; if I find myself unfit to ride my horse, I stop.” He traveled as he read and wrote: by following the promptings of pleasure./findings/0287/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0287/For a while, there were two different realities, depending on which side you were on./findings/0288/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0288/Such writers, says Hazlitt, collect curiosities of human life just as natural history enthusiasts collect shells, fossils, or beetles as they stroll along a forest path or seashore. They capture things as they really are rather than as they should be. Montaigne was the finest of them all because he allowed everything to be what it was, including himself./findings/0289/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0289/Montaigne wanted to drift away, yet he also wanted to attach himself to reality and extract every grain of experience from it. Writing made it possible to do both./findings/0290/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0290/Just as he would not think of passing judgment on a roomful of acquaintances, all of whom had their own reasons and points of view to explain what they had done, so he would not think of judging previous versions of Montaigne. “We are all patchwork,” he wrote, “and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.”/findings/0291/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0291/It is beguiling; it is flattering. One looks into one’s copy of the Essays like the Queen in Snow White looking into her mirror. Before there is even time to ask the fairy-tale question, the mirror croons back, “You’re the fairest of them all.”/findings/0292/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0292/Old age provides an opportunity to recognize one’s fallibility in a way youth usually finds difficult./findings/0293/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0293/Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself. Either this is not an answer at all, or it is the only possible answer./findings/0294/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0294/Learning how to die was learning to let go; learning to live was learning to hang on./findings/0295/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0295/Knowing that the life that remained to him could not be of great length, he said, “I try to increase it in weight, I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it.”/findings/0296/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0296/The new theories of education emphasized that learning should be pleasurable, and that the only motivation children needed was their inborn desire for knowledge./findings/0297/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0297/As happens with much early life experience, it benefited him in exactly the areas where it also damaged him./findings/0298/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0298/Often, books need not be used at all. One learns dancing by dancing; one learns to play the lute by playing the lute. The same is true of thinking, and indeed of living./findings/0299/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0299/His rule in reading remained the one he had learned from Ovid: pursue pleasure. “If I encounter difficulties in reading,” he wrote, “I do not gnaw my nails over them; I leave them there. I do nothing without gaiety.”/findings/0300/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0300/I defy any reader of Montaigne not to put down the book at some point and say with incredulity: ‘How did he know all that about me?’ The answer is, of course, that he knows it by knowing about himself./findings/0301/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0301/I opened up a bit and explained that I have a type I’m drawn to naturally, but that I’ve found that the women I’ve ended up loving the most have never been what I’ve thought of as my type, maybe because part of love is being helpless, being out of control of your own emotions./findings/0302/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0302/The day is the only unit of time that I can really get my head around. Seasons change, weeks are completely human-made, but the day has a rhythm. The sun goes up; the sun goes down. I can handle that./findings/0303/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0303/People often ask me, “How do you find the time for all this?” And I answer, “I look for it.” You find time the same place you find spare change: in the nooks and crannies./findings/0304/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0304/Whatever we say, we’re always talking about ourselves./findings/0305/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0305/The writer George Saunders, speaking of his own near-death experience, said, “For three or four days after that, it was the most beautiful world. To have gotten back in it, you know? And I thought, if you could walk around like that all the time, to really have that awareness that it’s actually going to end. That’s the trick.”/findings/0306/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0306/It was clear now why Yahweh had not struck down the tower, had not punished men for wishing to reach beyond the bounds set for them: for the longest journey would merely return them to the place whence they’d come. Centuries of their labor would not reveal to them any more of Creation than they already knew. Yet through their endeavor, men would glimpse the unimaginable artistry of Yahweh’s work, in seeing how ingeniously the world had been constructed./findings/0307/Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0307/Lots of being a kid is watching and waiting, and Totoro understands this. When Mei catches a glimpse of a small Totoro running under her house, she crouches down and stares into the gap, waiting. Miyazaki holds on this image: we wait with her. Magical things happen, but most of life happens in between those things—and this has a kind of gentle magic of its own./findings/0266/Tue, 07 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0266/Toby is a powerful man: in his physicality, in his experiences, in his charisma. But all that power has culminated in gentleness. It is as if that is the point of power: to allow one to access the higher registers of gentleness./findings/0263/Mon, 06 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0263/We often think that the empathetic function in fiction is accomplished via the writer’s relation to his characters, but it’s also accomplished via the writer’s relation to his reader./findings/0264/Mon, 06 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0264/What is a saint? Someone particularly attentive to things as they are, and extraordinarily accepting of them. Paley honors every person and thing she creates by presenting it at its best, or at least its liveliest—which may be the same thing./findings/0265/Mon, 06 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0265/Paley understood that just because such language doesn’t normally get spoken aloud in the so-called real world, that does not make it unreal, or contrived. On the contrary: language like this is the real language going on in the head of man all the time, whether he can articulate it or not./findings/0262/Sun, 05 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0262/We fear that, if we actually could explain our dissertation and book projects to others in simple, but still precise, ways, we might face that most troubling question—“So what?”—without being able to come up with a remotely plausible answer./findings/0261/Thu, 02 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0261/I reread my favorite books to make sure they’re still perfect, but rereading them wears away at their perfection./findings/0260/Wed, 01 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0260/The new division in politics is those who favor the current global hegemony and those who are against it. Right and left have been competing to become this new radical anti-status quo party. And so far, in both Europe and America, the right has won./findings/0258/Fri, 24 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0258/As for my writing voice in general, well, you get old and your language gets like your shoes or your kitchen gear—you don’t need fancy stuff any more. You’ve learned how to just say it./findings/0259/Fri, 24 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0259/A very good book tells me things I didn’t know I knew, yet I recognize them— yes, I see, yes, this is how the world is./findings/0257/Fri, 17 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0257/Take it. take it in, take in more every weekend, every day, and quickly it becomes the theater that intrigues, relaxes, fascinates, seduces, and above all expands any mind focused on it. Outside lies utterly ordinary space open to any casual explorer willing to find the extraordinary./findings/0256/Sun, 12 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0256/The artist transcends the immediate. Transcends the here and now. Transcends the madness of the world. Transcends terrorism and war. The artist thinks, acts, performs music, and writes outside the framework that society has created. The artist may do no more than give us beauty, laughter, passion, surprise, and drama./findings/0255/Fri, 10 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0255/What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism./findings/0254/Wed, 08 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0254/It seems to me that educated people should know something about the 13-billion-year prehistory of our species and the basic laws governing the physical and living world, including our bodies and brains. They should grasp the timeline of human history from the dawn of agriculture to the present. They should be exposed to the diversity of human cultures, and the major systems of belief and value with which they have made sense of their lives./findings/0253/Mon, 06 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0253/Remember that a large number of people become certified or degreed by furnishing other people’s answers to other people’s questions./findings/0252/Thu, 02 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0252/A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel./findings/0248/Wed, 18 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0248/I shared the geography but not the world It seemed they were establishing With such unfussy self-possession, nor The novels they were writing secretly That somehow turned to ‘Mum’s old stuff’./findings/0249/Wed, 18 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0249/I opened the front door, and rain was falling. I stood for a few minutes, lost in the beauty of it. Rain has a way of bringing out the contours of everything; it throws a coloured blanket over previously invisible things; instead of an intermittent and thus fragmented world, the steadily falling rain creates continuity of acoustic experience. This is an experience of great beauty. I feel as if the world, which is veiled until I touch it, has suddenly disclosed itself to me./findings/0250/Wed, 18 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0250/What we mourn for the dead is the loss of their hopes./findings/0251/Wed, 18 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0251/All paintings, Berger writes in “Brief as Photos,” “are prophecies of themselves being looked at”—they anticipate the viewers who will stand before them, long after they were made. That anticipation collapses distinct moments into one another, defying the absences that time creates./findings/0246/Wed, 11 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0246/Personal productivity presents itself as an antidote to busyness when it might better be understood as yet another form of busyness. And as such, it serves the same psychological role that busyness has always served: to keep us sufficiently distracted that we don’t have to ask ourselves potentially terrifying questions about how we are spending our days./findings/0247/Wed, 11 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0247/It isn’t compulsory to earn more money, achieve more goals, realise our potential on every dimension, or fit more in. In a quiet moment in Seattle, Robert Levine, a social psychologist from California, quoted the environmentalist Edward Abbey: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”/findings/0244/Tue, 10 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0244/Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you./findings/0245/Tue, 10 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0245/The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied… but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which as beggar is a reminder of nothing./findings/0243/Sat, 07 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0243/The human animal is a learning animal; we like to learn; we are good at it; we don’t need to be shown how or made to do it. What kills the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to regulate it or control it./findings/0242/Sun, 25 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0242/One night in L.A., we were talking about the dreamy pleasures of old movies, and I told him I was impressed by the way that, in his own work, everyone is always filmed as if they were beautiful. “You know, I don’t shoot them that way because I like beauty,” he told me. “I do it because I love them.”/findings/0241/Mon, 12 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0241/How wild is it that every version of you probably exists still, somewhere, in someone’s memory? The messy you, crying on the floor exists still in your mind. The happy, sun-soaked you, exists in your best friend’s memory. No part of you has died, all parts of us exist always, simultaneously and hidden./findings/0239/Sat, 10 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0239/Imagine what you would like to see happen, and then don’t do anything to make it impossible./findings/0240/Sat, 10 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0240/Know that the desire to be perfect is probably the veiled expression of another desire—to be loved, perhaps, or not to die./findings/0238/Thu, 08 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0238/I don’t think I ever was quite naive enough to believe, even at twenty-one, that racially homogeneous societies were necessarily happier or more peaceful than ours simply by virtue of their homogeneity. My best friend during my youth—now my husband—is himself from Northern Ireland, an area where people who look absolutely identical to each other, eat the same food, pray to the same God, read the same holy book, wear the same clothes, and celebrate the same holidays have yet spent four hundred years at war over a relatively minor doctrinal difference they later allowed to morph into an all-encompassing argument over land, government, and national identity./findings/0237/Wed, 07 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0237/Only by looking “outward,” by caring for things that, in terms of pure survival, he needn’t bother with at all, by constantly asking himself all sorts of questions, and by throwing himself over and over again into the tumult of the world, with the intention of making his voice count – only thus does one really become a person, a creator of the “order of the spirit,” a being capable of a miracle: the re-creation of the world./findings/0235/Tue, 29 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0235/That old, dog-eared book containing “Story of Your Life” lived on my desk during that stint, and I referenced it the way a priest returns to the holy bible. This is one of the great advantages of adaptation: You aren’t alone./findings/0236/Tue, 29 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0236/Your question does make me think of an idea that I heard from the critic John Clute: the notion that certain scenarios are easily storyable, meaning suited to being told as a story, while others are not. I remember once having a conversation with him during which he noted that climate change, as a topic, was not very storyable. I was inclined to agree, but felt that a lot of ideas don’t seem storyable until someone actually does it./findings/0234/Fri, 25 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0234/How does one hate a country, or love one? I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?/findings/0233/Fri, 18 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0233/Whatever the medium, the creative person’s task is to interpret an essentially unchanging reality, a dog-eared reality pondered by Homer and Mel Brooks and everyone in between. The artist succeeds if he or she can present something familiar from an unfamiliar angle./findings/0231/Tue, 15 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0231/What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?/findings/0232/Tue, 15 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0232/What I’ll think is that you are clearly, maddeningly not me. It will remind me, again, that you won’t be a clone of me; you can be wonderful, a daily delight, but you won’t be someone I could have created by myself./findings/0230/Mon, 14 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0230/It’s possible to think of the camps as what happens when you cross three disciplinary institutions that all societies possess—the prison, the army, and the factory. Over the several phases of their existence, the Nazi camps took on the aspects of all of these, so that prisoners were treated simultaneously as inmates to be corrected, enemies to be combatted, and workers to be exploited./findings/0229/Mon, 14 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0229/Spend less time crafting the perfect questions/ more time listening to and for the answers./findings/0227/Sun, 13 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0227/Instead of saying ‘I don’t have time’ try saying ‘it’s not a priority,’ and see how that feels. Often, that’s a perfectly adequate explanation. I have time to iron my sheets, I just don’t want to. But other things are harder. Try it: ‘I’m not going to edit your résumé, sweetie, because it’s not a priority.’ ‘I don’t go to the doctor because my health is not a priority.’ If these phrases don’t sit well, that’s the point./findings/0228/Sun, 13 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0228/If you don’t know how much you need, the default easily becomes “more.”/findings/0226/Fri, 11 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0226/Here is how you write a story: you take life, cut out pretty much all of it except for like four things, make up some other stuff, and then move all the stuff around, and just in general distort the world in all kinds of ways until it makes sense to our dumb primate brains./findings/0223/Thu, 03 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0223/School is the advertising agency which makes you believe you need the society as it is./findings/0224/Thu, 03 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0224/Defining the secret of reading aloud well, he says it is “refusing to look ahead, to be in the moment”. And he says that a story puts its listener “in an eternal present”./findings/0225/Thu, 03 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0225/Forty-four years ago he was a charismatic presence, looking into the camera with piercing eyes and a frequent frown, as if constantly on the edge of disagreeing with himself./findings/0219/Mon, 31 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0219/When your kids are young, you have the wide-open opportunity to make your best life. As they get older, they’ll be much more resistant to change — they’ll want to cling to the familiar. So now is the time to think about your family culture — how you can make your daily life reflect your values./findings/0220/Mon, 31 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0220/How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives./findings/0221/Mon, 31 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0221/Children learn from their families what to love and value. Some parents have the impression that they shouldn’t impose their values on their children. But if parents don’t teach their children values, the culture will. Good parents are what Ellen Goodman called counterculture. They counter the culture with deeper, richer values./findings/0222/Mon, 31 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0222/It’s not a pretty picture: an economy where high levels of stress and anxiety are normal, where people get ill because they’ve lost control of their time, where marriages are damaged and children suffer. And yet, it’s a picture we’re invited to applaud. Our political leaders idolise “strivers” and “hard-working people”, not “chilled-out, caring dads”, for example./findings/0217/Fri, 28 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0217/Kurt taught a Chekhov story. I can’t remember the name of it. I didn’t quite understand the point, since nothing much happened. An adolescent girl is in love with this boy and that boy and another; she points at a little dog, as I recall, or maybe something else, and laughs. That’s all. There’s no conflict, no dramatic turning point or change. Kurt pointed out that she has no words for the sheer joy of being young, ripe with life, her own juiciness, and the promise of romance./findings/0218/Fri, 28 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0218/I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be./findings/0216/Sun, 23 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0216/More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible. Children need one now… It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity./findings/0215/Fri, 21 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0215/Between officially scheduled educational activities, parents look for “teachable moments” while interacting with their children. But the foundation for play is free improvisation, and nothing wrecks play like a hidden agenda from one of the participants./findings/0214/Tue, 18 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0214/Speaking of which … this afternoon … the interviewers … I do not know if I will have the time to prepare. I could try to improvise but I believe an interview needs to be prepared ahead of time to sound spontaneous./findings/0213/Mon, 17 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0213/The handles of a craftsman’s tools bespeak an absolute simplicity, the plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibilities for the user’s hand. That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcomes guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace./findings/0212/Wed, 12 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0212/What this kind of approach requires, of course, is the willingness to meet the child as an individual. “I had an image of what Charlie ‘should’ be,” one parent says. “I wasn’t keeping my eyes focused on the real boy in front of me.”/findings/0211/Mon, 10 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0211/He’s also not worried about representing something accurately; he’s actually creating something. So, if he’s drawing a tree, in his mind he’s not creating a drawing of a tree, he’s actually creating the tree. John Baldessari said that everything he knew about drawing he learned from watching children draw./findings/0206/Sun, 09 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0206/I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ’If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’/findings/0207/Sun, 09 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0207/Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique./findings/0208/Sun, 09 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0208/You would suddenly find his eyes on you—very blue, very kind and gentle, and even now not stern so much as inflexible/findings/0209/Sun, 09 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0209/Since people exist only in life, they must devote their time simply to being alive. Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part./findings/0210/Sun, 09 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0210/The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost./findings/0205/Tue, 04 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0205/I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time: some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next; or there’s my way—making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works./findings/0204/Sun, 02 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0204/Technology does only one thing – it tends toward efficiency. It has no aesthetics. It has no ethics. Its code is binary. But everything interesting in life – everything that makes life worth living – happens between the binary. Mercy is not binary. Love is not binary. Music and art are not binary. You and I are not binary./findings/0203/Thu, 29 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0203/Years ago, I was habitually late. “I can’t help it!” I declared to an expert in time management. “Have you ever missed a plane?” she asked. I had not. “Then you can help it. You just care more about yourself than about the needs of others.”/findings/0202/Thu, 15 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0202/Remember that writing is not typing. Thinking, researching, contemplating, outlining, composing in your head and in sketches, maybe some typing, with revisions as you go, and then more revisions, deletions, emendations, additions, reflections, setting aside and returning afresh, because a good writer is always a good editor of his or her own work. Typing is this little transaction in the middle of two vast thoughtful processes./findings/0201/Fri, 02 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0201/There could not be two substances in the universe, Spinoza argued, one physical and the other divine, since this involved a logical contradiction. If God and Nature were distinct, then it must be the case that Nature had some qualities that God lacked, and the idea of a supreme being lacking anything was incoherent. It follows that God and Nature are just two names for the same thing, the Being that comprises everything that ever existed or ever will exist./findings/0198/Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0198/This is why, Gottlieb observes, people complain that philosophy never seems to be making progress: “Any corner of it that comes generally to be regarded as useful soon ceases to be called philosophy.”/findings/0199/Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0199/Modernity cannot be identified with any particular technological or social breakthrough. Rather, it is a subjective condition, a feeling or an intuition that we are in some profound sense different from the people who lived before us./findings/0200/Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0200/Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing./findings/0197/Wed, 31 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0197/The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free./findings/0196/Fri, 26 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0196/That said, when I am actually procrastinating, it’s usually because at some level I don’t fully believe in (or agree with) whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing. Or maybe it’s because I’m afraid I will fail once I do get to work./findings/0195/Wed, 24 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0195/Part of that is knowing when not to work. There is a time for output but also a time for rest, for intake, for seeing what else the world has to offer./findings/0192/Tue, 16 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0192/In art, Rilke had started to realize, there was never anything waiting on the other side: There was no god, no secret revealed, and in most cases no reward. There was only the doing./findings/0193/Tue, 16 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0193/Rilke wrote “in a tone of authority that only an amateur would dare.”/findings/0194/Tue, 16 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0194/If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place./findings/0187/Sat, 13 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0187/We are imperfect lenses trying to resolve our influences onto a new screen, and the mistakes we make in copying we call originality./findings/0189/Sat, 13 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0189/Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky./findings/0190/Sat, 13 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0190/The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things./findings/0188/Sat, 13 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0188/Watch a child when she is drawing or painting. You will see a worried look on her face — a look of intense concentration. Is she working or playing?/findings/0191/Sat, 13 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0191/Song itself cannot happen without time, without the voice rising and falling away. For is not impermanence the very fragrance of our days?/findings/0186/Thu, 11 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0186/New things are happening very quietly inside of me./findings/0185/Wed, 10 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0185/The paradoxical virtue of reading: it takes us out of the world so we might find meaning in it./findings/0184/Sun, 07 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0184/Perhaps the most true and timeless version of Paris, for everyone, might be a version of this one — the Paris filtered through remembered dreams./findings/0179/Mon, 01 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0179/In the face of what looks like unbroken failure, she is so persistent. Most of her experiments, her efforts to predict and control her environment, don’t work. But she goes right on, not the least daunted. Perhaps this is because there are no penalties attached to failure, except nature’s—usually if you try to step on a ball, you fall down. A baby does not react to failure as an adult does, or even a five-year-old, because she has not yet been made to feel that failure is shame, disgrace, a crime./findings/0180/Mon, 01 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0180/You can’t feel crazily grateful to be alive your whole life anymore than you can stay passionately in love forever, or grieve forever for that matter. Time makes us all betray ourselves and get back to the busy work of living./findings/0181/Mon, 01 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0181/Success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it./findings/0183/Mon, 01 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0183/Okay, nurture the positive human parts of yourself and hope they get into your work, eventually./findings/0178/Mon, 01 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0178/Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to…/findings/0182/Mon, 01 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0182/You know when you’re saying goodbye to somebody at the airport that you love and you get all soft? You’re like, “Oh my god, I hardly knew ya.” You know, that kind of feeling? What if that’s the truth? That that times ten is the mode that we should exist in all the time? Then another day you’re just yourself. There’s a big gap between those two people. So, my regret would be how much time did I spend in that regular, old, stupid habitual mindset of taking everything for granted, as opposed to this exalted state of being super-tenderized to the people you care about./findings/0176/Tue, 26 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0176/How to take a compliment: 1) “Thanks for saying that, it means a lot to me.” 2) “I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m really going to try to make it true.”/findings/0177/Tue, 26 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0177/Home is not where you are born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease./findings/0175/Mon, 18 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0175/MetroCard is from New York City and he never lets you forget it. He has real “attitude.” He is yellow and black, with Cirque du Soleil advertisement on back./findings/0173/Sat, 16 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0173/All immigrants are artists because they create a life, a future, from nothing but a dream. The immigrant’s life is art in its purest form./findings/0172/Sat, 16 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0172/He who seeks truth shall find beauty He who seeks beauty shall find vanity He who seeks order shall find gratification He who seeks gratification shall be disappointed He who considers himself a servant of his fellow beings shall find the joy of self expression He who seeks self expression shall fall into the pit of arrogance/findings/0174/Sat, 16 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0174/My two favourite things in life are libraries and bicycles. They both move people forward without wasting anything./findings/0166/Fri, 15 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0166/Networks divide people, first from themselves and then from each other, on the grounds that this is the efficient way to perform a task. It may well be, but it is a lousy way to feel good about being alive. Networks make people lonely. They cannot correct their inhuman mechanism and still succeed as networks./findings/0167/Fri, 15 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0167/Networks have their place, but that they lack any real ability to nourish their members emotionally. The only ones I consider completely safe are the ones that reject their communal facade, acknowledge their limits, and concentrate solely on helping me do a specific and necessary task./findings/0168/Fri, 15 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0168/I assign a type of extended schooling called “homework,” so that the effect of surveillance, if not the surveillance itself, travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or mother, by exploration or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood…. children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central control. Children will follow a private drummer if you can’t get them into a uniformed marching band./findings/0169/Fri, 15 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0169/I don’t work. I only know how to have fun every day./findings/0170/Fri, 15 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0170/He who seeks beauty will find it./findings/0171/Fri, 15 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0171/You can’t be interested in someone who won’t tell you anything. Being good at sharing is not the same as talking and talking and talking. It means you share your ideas, you let people play with them and you’re good at talking about them without having to talk about yourself./findings/0165/Mon, 11 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0165/While humans are excellent at empathizing with individuals, we are pretty terrible at empathizing with large groups of people who aren’t us; in part this is because we are collectively interacting with systems, which we aren’t very good at understanding and interacting with either. One person’s lack of access to medical care is cause for a fundraiser, but thirty million people without health insurance is a ‘choice’ that needs to be protected./findings/0163/Fri, 06 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0163/You can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth. You have to view the world in different ways to do it justice, and the different ways can each be very rich, can each be internally consistent, can each have its own language and rules, but they may be mutually incompatible, and to do full justice to reality, you have to take both of them into account./findings/0162/Sat, 19 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0162/A decent swimmer in his own estimate, Vedantam went out into the sea one day and discovered that he had become superb and powerful; he was instantly proud of his new abilities. Far from shore, he realized he had been riding a current and was going to have to fight it all the way back to shore. “Unconscious bias influences our lives in exactly the same manner as that undercurrent,” Vedantam writes./findings/0161/Fri, 04 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0161/Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating./findings/0160/Mon, 22 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0160/The best thing I know is to do exactly what you wish for a while./findings/0157/Fri, 19 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0157/Holding myself tenderly in this marred body. Wondering if the quiet I feel is that happiness wise people speak of, or the modulation that is the acquiescence to death beginning./findings/0158/Fri, 19 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0158/A man said no person is educated who knows only one language, for he cannot distinguish between his thought and the English version./findings/0159/Fri, 19 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0159/The heart never fits the journey. Always one ends first./findings/0154/Mon, 08 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0154/If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world./findings/0155/Mon, 08 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0155/This is what youth must figure out: Girls, love, and living. The having, the not having, The spending and giving, And the meloncholy time of not knowing. This is what age must learn about: The ABC of dying. The going, yet not going, The loving and leaving, And the unbearable knowing and knowing./findings/0156/Mon, 08 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0156/For some reason, online communities seem particularly resistant to the type of elitist promotion structure common in real world institutions. In Academia, high school students have to fight to become undergraduates. Undergraduates have to fight to become PhD candidates. PhD candidates have to fight to become adjuncts. Adjuncts have to fight to become tenured and tenured professors have to fight to become Dean. I can’t even think of a single online community that bears even the slightest resemblance to this sort of power structure./findings/0152/Sun, 07 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0152/Young people often signal through their pretensions what they hope to become… They see people whom they admire, or are in some way attracted to, and they try to copy the preferences of those paragons. Such copying can lead to more and more pretension; but in many cases the pretense becomes real: the tastes we aspire to often become our own tastes./findings/0153/Sun, 07 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0153/Good art is pointable. Something complex occurs, and you can’t quite explain how you feel about it. Instead, you find the appropriate book, song, poem, whatever, then point to it, and say “That. That is how I feel.” It’s a shorthand that stands in place of your own words. It speaks for you./findings/0151/Thu, 04 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0151/It would’ve been a better essay if I’d explained how disillusioned and lost I felt at that moment in my life. But that’s not how we did it back then. We changed every first-person confession into a royal “we” (or a less royal “you”)./findings/0149/Wed, 03 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0149/The essential thing about writing is not understanding, but the pleasure of reading./findings/0150/Wed, 03 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0150/I use a very poor alphabet to express ideas which are very complicated./findings/0148/Tue, 02 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0148/Write about the lessons now so familiar they can be recited in your sleep. Write about the insights not yet sighted, their silhouettes blurry like the edges of a distant shore. Write about the job, the joy and chaos of designing and building. Write at least once a week. Write to learn how to write, and write to understand, the process itself like a looking glass through which you may yet discover a strange new world./findings/0143/Sat, 30 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0143/I have no plan to stop making dick jokes or to swear off ragging people who clearly have it coming to them. It’s just that it’s important to me to make world-class dick jokes and to rag the worthy in a way that no one is expecting. I want to become an evangelist for hard work and editing, and I want to get to a place where it shows in everything that I do, make, and share./findings/0144/Sat, 30 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0144/It reminds me that story is the atomic unit of magic. […] It proves to me that life is about noticing and deeming the mundane as special, and that if you do that, just maybe you can wring the last bits of beauty out of this life while you’re here./findings/0145/Sat, 30 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0145/But just because you can’t have opinions about all things doesn’t mean you can’t have opinions about any things. There are some things we know for sure. These might be minor—how to treat your parents, how to grow tomatoes, how to build a house. We each have a few such things. Start there with your feet firmly planted and see how it feels. Then take a few small steps until you reach a place that still feels firm, but where nobody else is standing./findings/0146/Sat, 30 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0146/Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us./findings/0147/Sat, 30 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0147/Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style./findings/0141/Wed, 27 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0141/I think one of the best things you can do for an artist is to trust them. Especially when they change./findings/0142/Wed, 27 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0142/We come to other people’s creative work out of a secret desire and hope that someone understands us better than we understand ourselves. We come to Austen and Kubrick and Basquiat and Aretha under the hopes that they have the same acute feelings, but more able hands and voices that can some how capture that fleeting emotion and crystalize it. We quote, because someone said it better than we can./findings/0138/Tue, 26 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0138/I don’t think good poetry can be produced in a kind of political attempt to overthrow some existing form. I think it just supersedes. People find a way in which they can say something. “I can’t say it that way, what way can I find that will do?” One didn’t really bother about the existing modes./findings/0139/Tue, 26 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0139/As a rule, with me an unfinished thing is a thing that might as well be rubbed out. It’s better, if there’s something good in it that I might make use of elsewhere, to leave it at the back of my mind than on paper in a drawer. If I leave it in a drawer it remains the same thing but if it’s in the memory it becomes transformed into something else./findings/0140/Tue, 26 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0140/He was a marvelous critic because he didn’t try to turn you into an imitation of himself. He tried to see what you were trying to do./findings/0133/Sat, 23 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0133/Communication must be instant and it must be exact./findings/0134/Sat, 23 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0134/It depends on the person looking, because each of us sees only what he knows./findings/0135/Sat, 23 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0135/Your heart goes tick tock. Listen to it. Put your hand on it and feel it. Count the beats: one, two, three, four….When you have counted sixty beats a minute will have passed. After sixty minutes an hour will have passed. In one hour a plant grows a hundredth of an inch. In twelve hours the sun rises and sets. Twenty-four hours make one whole day and one whole night. After this the clock is no good to us any more./findings/0136/Sat, 23 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0136/A leaf is beautiful not because it is stylish but because it is natural, created in its exact form by its exact function. A designer tries to make an object as naturally as a tree puts forth a leaf./findings/0137/Sat, 23 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0137/I believe if there’s any kind of God it wouldn’t be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If there’s any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it’s almost impossible to succeed but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt./findings/0132/Fri, 22 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0132/My library is an archive of longings./findings/0131/Tue, 12 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0131/Draw a monster. Now tell me: why is it a monster?/findings/0117/Mon, 11 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0117/We’re attracted to the painting [Nighthawks] because it is not finished. All of the paint has been applied, but there’s a gap that frustrates the viewer from deducing what is happening in the picture. […] The painting is lacking; it requires us to contribute something of ourselves in order to fill the void and finish it./findings/0118/Mon, 11 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0118/I have fond memories, from when I was young, of how my parents would sit at the kitchen table before serving dinner and talk to one another about their day. My sister and I weren’t terribly interested in the office politics at my mother’s job, but my father was always there, listening and nodding. Now that I’m older, I realize that the point of those chats was to give my mother an opportunity to tell a story so that my father could understand why she was a different person that night compared to when she left for work in the morning./findings/0119/Mon, 11 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0119/One human life, closely observed, is everyone’s life. In the particular is the universal./findings/0120/Mon, 11 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0120/Projects that seem cold or excessively composed are more indicative of a lack of understanding than a mark of professionalism. One can speak naturally and personally when they know someone well, and a friendly, affectionate, and hospitable tone is essential to cater to audiences, encourage dialogue with platforms, and produce the utility and resonance that great design seeks to achieve./findings/0121/Mon, 11 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0121/But, the things that we make are more than just objects. They’re the way we paint pictures of what’s to come. […] They come from the friction between the world we live in and the one we want to live in by building on top of our longings and exemplifying our capabilities./findings/0122/Mon, 11 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0122/What is the marker of good design? It moves. The story of a successful piece of design begins with the movement of its maker while it is being made, and amplifies by its publishing, moving the work out and around. It then continues in the feeling the work stirs in the audience when they see, use, or contribute to the work, and intensifies as the audience passes it on to others./findings/0123/Mon, 11 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0123/We use design to close the gap between the situation we have and the one we desire./findings/0124/Mon, 11 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0124/Education, just like climbing the ladder, must be balanced between How and Why. We so quickly forget that people, especially children, will not willingly do what we teach them unless they are shown the joys of doing so./findings/0125/Mon, 11 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0125/I can imagine the excitement in the room when Stradivari would hand his newest violin to a skilled musician, because the violinist would unlock the instrument’s full potential by playing it. The products of design, like Stradivari’s violins, possess an aspect that can only be revealed through their use./findings/0126/Mon, 11 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0126/Objectives guide the process toward an effective end, but they don’t do much to help one get going. In fact, the weight of the objectives can crush the seeds of thought necessary to begin down an adventurous path./findings/0127/Mon, 11 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0127/I find the best way to gain momentum is to think of the worst possible way to tackle the project. Quality may be elusive, but stupidity is always easily accessible; absurdity is fine, maybe even desired./findings/0128/Mon, 11 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0128/Picasso, during his Blue Period, painted only monochromatically. Limitations allow us to get to work without having to wait for a muse to show up. Instead, the process and the limitations suggest the first few steps; after that, the motion of making carries us forward./findings/0129/Mon, 11 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0129/Design can speak the tongue of art with the force of commerce./findings/0130/Mon, 11 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0130/Every jazz club or improv comedy theater is a temple to the process of production. It’s a factory, and the art is the assembly, not the product. Jazz is more verb than noun./findings/0116/Sun, 10 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0116/The best is often when nothing is happening. […] Our lives happen between the memorable./findings/0114/Sat, 09 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0114/I don’t understand the need for trickery or some new way of arranging words on a page. You’re allowed to do that. You’re allowed to write all kinds of poetry, but there’s a whole world out there./findings/0115/Sat, 09 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0115/Unfortunately, we found the Greece we knew was no longer there. Our Greece was wonderfully bucolic. Very quiet, peaceful, slow, friendly—farmers plowing, a couple of men in small boats, almost no electronics. A civilization that lasted four hundred years is gone now. Gone the way Paris is gone, the way Italy is gone. All gone. Everything that I dreamed of is gone. It was such a blessing to get over there when it still was./findings/0112/Fri, 08 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0112/To celebrate life, but not in a way that ignores its complexity./findings/0113/Fri, 08 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0113/Spending time among the replicators has helped me become aware of what it’s easy to acknowledge intellectually but more difficult to feel: that a piece of art is mortal; that it is the work of many hands, only some of which are coeval with the artist; that time is the medium of media; that one person’s damage is another’s patina; that the present’s notion of its past and future are changeable fictions; that a museum is at sea./findings/0111/Mon, 04 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0111/If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment./findings/0110/Sun, 03 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0110/I mean, photography is all right if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops—for a split second/findings/0109/Thu, 31 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0109/A wise woman one asked me: “What are you willing to give up in order to have the life that you really want?” I said, “Wow, I guess I have to say no to things I don’t want to do.” And she said, “No, you have to say no to things you do want to do — that party on Saturday night that you really want to go to, that television series that you’re obsessed with … you’re not doing that anymore./findings/0108/Tue, 29 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0108/Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something./findings/0104/Fri, 25 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0104/A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses./findings/0105/Fri, 25 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0105/Mirrors should think longer before they reflect./findings/0106/Fri, 25 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0106/If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?/findings/0107/Fri, 25 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0107/To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life./findings/0103/Wed, 09 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0103/Consider these words that you are reading - where did they come from? What about the language they are written in? What about the shape of the letters themselves? What about the font? If you are sitting in a chair, who designed that chair? Or the floor on which it sits? Think about the recipes of the food you eat or the music you listen to. The world we actually live in is made of ideas that have left human minds and entered the physical world./findings/0101/Wed, 25 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0101/It’s the same when love comes to an end, or the marriage fails and people say they knew it was a mistake, that everybody said it would never work. That she was old enough to know better. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly./findings/0102/Wed, 25 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0102/How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it all wrong./findings/0100/Tue, 10 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0100/The hero in your life is never going to be the person who pats you on the head: it’s going to be the person who puts their own need to be liked aside to make you a better designer./findings/0099/Sat, 31 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0099/Hopefully, we are more than everybody can see./findings/0098/Wed, 28 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0098/You guys know about vampires? … You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways./findings/0092/Fri, 23 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0092/Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else./findings/0093/Fri, 23 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0093/The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing./findings/0094/Fri, 23 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0094/There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?/findings/0095/Fri, 23 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0095/What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic./findings/0096/Fri, 23 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0096/Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself./findings/0097/Fri, 23 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0097/You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do./findings/0089/Sun, 18 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0089/The human race tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What’s left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars./findings/0088/Sun, 18 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0088/All artforms are in the service of the greatest of all arts: the art of living./findings/0090/Sun, 18 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0090/Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos./findings/0091/Sun, 18 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0091/Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.’/findings/ask-culture-and-guess-culture/Fri, 09 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/ask-culture-and-guess-culture/In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it’s OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture. In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t even have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer./findings/0086/Mon, 24 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0086/To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means ‘not like this’ and ‘not like that.’ And the ‘not like’—that’s why postmodernism, with the prefix of ‘post,’ couldn’t work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one./findings/0085/Mon, 10 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0085/But I remember to sense where I am. To sense my feet in the grass and the cool night on my skin. I look up at the dark line of trees and the fireflies flickering at the base of them, and the stars dimly emerging overhead and the moonlit trees all around me, and instead of jokes or stories this time I say out loud that I think this place is already heaven, and everybody in it is already an angel, and we’re here in heaven to make heaven a better place for the other angels./findings/0084/Wed, 27 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0084/I’ve come to believe that a lot of what’s wrong with the Internet has to do with memory. The Internet somehow contrives to remember too much and too little at the same time, and it maps poorly on our concepts of how memory should work./findings/0083/Wed, 06 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0083/The trick to being truly creative, I’ve always maintained, is to be completely unselfconscious. To resist the urge to self-censor. To not-give-a-shit what anybody thinks. That’s why children are so good at it. And why people with Volkswagens, and mortgages, Personal Equity Plans and matching Lois Vutton luggage are not./findings/0082/Thu, 23 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0082/Man is born crying. When he has cried enough, he dies./findings/0081/Mon, 06 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0081/The loop is a signature of our times, whether in musical beats or GIFS. The loop is repetition, over and over again in the now./findings/0080/Tue, 24 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0080/If we give the impression that creativity is the sole domain of the creative industries, why are we surprised when it is considered irrelevant to everyone else?/findings/0078/Sat, 14 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0078/Wherever life pours ordinary plenty. Isn’t that a beautiful description of the web?/findings/0079/Sat, 14 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0079/Interviewer - Suppose your house were on fire and you could remove only one thing. What would you take? Jean Cocteau - I would take the fire./findings/0076/Wed, 11 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0076/I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world./findings/0077/Wed, 11 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0077/I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past./findings/0075/Wed, 28 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0075/We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time./findings/0073/Mon, 26 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0073/Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman./findings/0074/Mon, 26 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0074/Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers./findings/0071/Sun, 25 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0071/Things that don’t last, last longer./findings/0072/Sun, 25 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0072/For someone with so much relationship advice, you seem awfully alone./findings/0066/Wed, 21 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0066/Find 3 sites that inspire you. Steal the layout from one, color scheme from another, and typography from the third. Combine those three, and you’ll realize you’ve created something original./findings/0067/Wed, 21 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0067/Nationalism didn’t exist in Europe until the Renaissance, when typography enabled every literate man to see his mother tongue analytically as a uniform entity. The printing press, by spreading mass-produced books and printed matter across Europe, turned the vernacular regional languages of the day into uniform closed systems of national languages — just another variant of what we call mass media — and gave birth to the entire concept of nationalism./findings/0068/Wed, 21 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0068/The contours of the resultant cartoonlike image are fleshed out within the imagination of the viewer, which necessitates great personal involvement and participation; the viewer, in fact, becomes the screen, whereas in film he becomes the camera./findings/0069/Wed, 21 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0069/Now man is beginning to wear his brain outside his skull and his nerves outside his skin; new technology breeds new man./findings/0070/Wed, 21 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0070/Speech is an utterance, or more precisely, an outering, of all our senses at once; the auditory field is simultaneous, the visual successive./findings/0064/Tue, 06 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0064/You tend not to outwardly express your feelings and spill your whole life story in the first hour of meeting someone. Or the first year. You have no interest or energy to prove yourself in a crowd of strangers./findings/0065/Tue, 06 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0065/“Strong opinions that are weakly held.”/findings/0063/Fri, 12 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0063/She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together./findings/0062/Tue, 09 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0062/Any movie that cares deeply about itself—even a comedy—is interesting. It’s the movies that lack the courage of their convictions, the ones that keep asking themselves what the audience wants, that go astray./findings/0061/Wed, 03 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0061/[Boyhood is] random, inexplicable, moody, evolutionary, unrefined, sweeping, stunning, heartbreaking and hilarious, and so is life./findings/0060/Sun, 19 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0060/White privilege is the right of whites, and only whites, to be judged as individuals, to be treated as a unique self, possessed of all the rights and protections of citizenship. I am not a race, I am the unmarked subject. I am simply man, whereas you might be a black man, an asian woman, a disabled native man, a homosexual latina woman, and on and on the qualifiers of identification go./findings/0058/Sun, 12 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0058/We should be eternally dissatisfied with the status quo but humble about our ability to improve it./findings/0059/Sun, 12 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0059/If, as the communications philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously said, television brought the brutality of war into people’s living rooms, the Internet today is bringing violence against women out of it./findings/0055/Fri, 19 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0055/An editor’s job is to make sure the story in the book is the same length as the book./findings/0056/Fri, 19 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0056/Jokes are written, puns discovered./findings/0057/Fri, 19 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0057/Our kids will inherit the junk yards./findings/0054/Thu, 21 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0054/There’s always a moment when I think a project is going to be really amazing—that’s the moment I love, and it’s what I live for. The best time is when you see what’s possible. When it’s over, it’s not possible, it just is. The future is always more interesting./findings/0053/Tue, 22 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0053/How restful it is to be around someone who has all the time in the world. Someone who isn’t rushing this way and that, clamoring to get more done./findings/0051/Fri, 04 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0051/Impostor Syndrome is that voice inside you saying that not everything is as it seems, and it could all be lost in a moment. The people with the problem are the people who can’t hear that voice./findings/0052/Fri, 04 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0052/Most people find this out pretty early on in life, because their logic is imperfect and fails them often. But really, really smart computer geek types may not ever find it out. They start off living in a bubble, they isolate themselves because socializing is unpleasant, and, if they get a good job straight out of school, they may never need to leave that bubble. To such people, it may appear that logic actually works, and that they are themselves logical creatures./findings/0049/Tue, 17 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0049/Words are like currencies: it is not meaningful to talk about what the ‘real’ or ‘correct’ value of a dollar bill is or should be, separate from what kinds of things a dollar bill can buy you./findings/0050/Tue, 17 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0050/Our stories have an ebb and flow, and design serves to support and enrich them./findings/0048/Mon, 16 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0048/I think there’s a couple different kinds of knowledge. There’s knowledge of the mind (theory stuff you find in books), knowledge of the hand (which you can only get by DOING the work), and knowledge of others (which you only get through empathy and relationships)./findings/0047/Thu, 29 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0047/To admit that we’ve fallen behind, that we don’t know what anyone is talking about, that we have nothing to say about each passing blip on the screen, is to be dead./findings/0045/Sat, 10 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0045/I write to discover what I know./findings/0046/Sat, 10 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0046/You can read plenty of information on the internet now. Print, however, still looks like the truth./findings/0044/Tue, 06 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0044/I’ve always felt that if a thing had been said in the best way, how can you say it better? If I wanted to say something and somebody had said it ideally, then I’d take it but give the person credit for it./findings/0043/Thu, 01 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0043/I don’t mind quoting a bad author if the line is good./findings/0042/Wed, 30 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0042/It’s natural to want the things we make to last. Even the smallest things, the ones made of the most fragile stuff. We want them have meaning, to be useful, to be bigger than ourselves somehow./findings/0002/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0002/While our new post-Internet Explorer 6 world enables an amazing array of browser effects, the one tool we all need is constraint. Though the people we serve—managers, stakeholders, and clients—come to us with parallax envy, we must be mindful of who we are all really working for: their customers, the users./findings/0003/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0003/This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences./findings/0004/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0004/But lately I’ve been spending a little bit of time with those random pieces of inspiration to see where they go. Usually they don’t go anywhere except for the outskirts of an artboard, lost forever amidst a sea of stray points and beziers./findings/0005/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0005/Who should care about your companies existence? Why should you matter to them? How can you communicate this in a clear, consistent, flexible, and meaningful way?/findings/0006/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0006/A website is its own, singular thing. We know it isn’t a book, a TV show, a film, or a song, but our language is limited to talking about it in those restrictive boxes. A website is a mix of all of those things, and none of those things. It is influenced by place and time. A website changes with age. It can evolve and regress./findings/0007/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0007/Giant men destroy that sleeping city with their words./findings/0008/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0008/The joy of pulp is the guilty pleasure of momentum, the sensation of progress, the whiplash of a joyride. That’s why chapters are so short in those terrible Dan Brown novels. You here and then you’ve finished it and now you’re there, and woah, look I’m reading! Look at all I’ve read!/findings/0009/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0009/I think there’s a pleasure to having everything under one roof. You feel together, all of you at once. In a way, building your own house is the ultimate project for a creative person: you’re making a home for what you think is important, done in the way you think is best./findings/0010/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0010/Why is timeless design always the goal? What’s wrong with making something look like it was made when it was made?/findings/0011/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0011/Nobody wants to talk about shitty old stuff, but lots of people still talk about shitty new stuff, because they are still trying to figure out if it is shitty or not. The past wasn’t better, we just forgot about all the shitty shit./findings/0012/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0012/There are plants and books and lights and seats and dust and you get the feeling it is a beautiful, functional space. There are finger prints all over it. The more I click around the web, the less and less I sense those fingerprints on people’s websites the way I used to./findings/0013/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0013/A work of art is something produced by a person, but is not that person — it is of her, but is not her. It’s a reach, really — the artist is trying to inhabit, temporarily, a more compact, distilled, efficient, wittier, more true-seeing, precise version of herself — one that she can’t replicate in so-called ‘real’ life, no matter how hard she tries. That’s why she writes: to try and briefly be more than she truly is./findings/0014/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0014/If you can’t draw as well as someone, or use the software as well, or if you do not have as much money to buy supplies, or if you do not have access to the tools they have, beat them by being more thoughtful. Thoughtfulness is free and burns on time and empathy./findings/0015/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0015/Quiet is always an option, even if everyone is yelling./findings/0016/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0016/These stories of his are not the only important moments in his life. They are not the only times he felt successful, accomplished, or proud. But whether it is the science of old age, or a conscious filtering—these few moments are the memories he chooses to share with us. They are from times and places that have changed him, and now his children and his grandchildren./findings/how-i-overcame-the-fear-of-being-an-artist-video-of-presentation-by-tim-caynes-at-dare-conference-24-25-sept-2013-london/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/how-i-overcame-the-fear-of-being-an-artist-video-of-presentation-by-tim-caynes-at-dare-conference-24-25-sept-2013-london/Art is in all of the things that you do And being an artist is just knowing that’s true/findings/0019/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0019/Once any symbol enters a culture’s visual language, the physical object it was initially based upon is no longer really relevant./findings/0020/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0020/While some have no doubt used either - or both - of these trends as a means for attention, I think it’s safe to assume just as many are using it as an introduction to something bigger./findings/0018/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0018/The internet isn’t an individual pursuit, it’s something we do with each other. The internet is where people are./findings/0021/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0021/I want to keep asking questions about how we can transcend memory, but hold the magnificence of imagination dear. So that we can enjoy the present, and dream about the future, while knowing our smiling remembrances of last night’s antics remain safe kept for revisiting. Our own personal movie./findings/0022/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0022/Maybe a friend or brand isn’t that unique anymore; I’ve met some other people/brands who are even cooler (loss of difference). This friend/brand doesn’t understand me like he used to, we have less and less in common (loss of relevance). I’m not sure if I still respect or trust this friend/brand the way I used to (loss of esteem). To me this friend/brand is just a name now (loss of knowledge)./findings/0023/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0023/According to Instagram, none of my friends have to go to work, their relationships are perfect, their shoes are badass, and their children are angels./findings/0024/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0024/You won’t arrive. It is an endless search./findings/0025/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0025/The grayscale box-and-line nature of wireframes discourages emotive design, eschewing it for hierarchy, structure, and logic. That’s correct when your goal is deliver logical easy-to-follow experiences, but when you’re trying to make something fun, memorable, remarkable, or thoroughly engaging, it best to cast them aside./findings/0026/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0026/There are so many things that we want to and can accomplish but a lot of us are sitting around waiting for permission. Permission that seems to never come. The kid in the ninth grade isn’t waiting for it. The acting student has already decided he’s an actor without anyone telling him he could be./findings/0027/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0027/First, technology can be awkward to write about. Also, to read about. The jargon is clumsy: download, reboot, global positioning device. It’s embarrassing, really./findings/0028/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0028/Throughout your life you will deal with a multitude of different people, and those people will be driven by different things. Some of them will be driven by a need to be liked. Some of them will be driven by a need to prove others wrong./findings/0029/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0029/I don’t know if my youthful fear of math originated within me or was a response to external cues and gendered expectations. Likely, it was a combination of the two. But I do know that no one ever challenged that belief; until that moment in that classroom in the spring of my freshman year, no one ever said, “Hey, you’re good at this.”/findings/0030/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0030/Our now-instinctual response to the unrelenting stream of information we’re subjected to every waking hour: Share first, ask questions later. Better yet: Let someone else ask the questions. Better still: What was the question again?/findings/0032/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0032/A symbol for the fact that life can be a bit more fun. A bit more interesting. A bit more exciting. Because to be perfectly honest, life isn’t always that great. And that’s exactly why you need movies, literature and magazines that are just the way your life isn’t./findings/0038/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0038/Being a professional has nothing to do with talent, knowledge, or experience. In my opinion, being a professional means you’re reliable./findings/0031/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0031/Your mom has no idea who Milton Glaser is./findings/0033/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0033/“I need some information please.” “Here you go.” “Thank you.” Too many sites have forgotten that this is all we want from them./findings/0034/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0034/Being criticized is never easy. Somehow everybody is somewhat right. Even the worst troll has to operate with a grain of truth./findings/0035/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0035/Good design is one part technology to two parts psychology and a swig of art history. Stir just until the lumps disappear./findings/0036/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0036/A classic does not necessarily teach us anything we did not know before. We sometimes discover something we have always known./findings/0037/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0037/Data can tell us everything; except why we love, yearn, wonder, imagine, grow, need, live, and die./findings/0039/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0039/The major problem with unsolicited redesigns is that they’re by nature uninformed. Without having access to the same user data as Facebook, how could you properly redesign Facebook? Without knowing Facebook’s goals and objectives, how can you design towards them?/findings/0040/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0040/Much like wood, I believe screens have grain: a certain way they’ve grown and matured that describes how they want to be treated. The grain is what gives the material its identity and tells you the best way to use it. Figure out the grain, and you know how to natively design for screens./findings/0041/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0041/It’s a software world. And because of software, it’s a soft world in a different sense, in the original sense of the word: it changes its shape easily./findings/0001/Tue, 29 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000/findings/0001/The accuser is also failing to recognize that there is, in all likelihood, a finite number of ways to “solve” any given task. Is it so completely unbelievable to assume that another talented individual happened to arrive at a similar conclusion as themselves? It’s just as easy to give someone the benefit of the doubt as it is to assume the worst of them.