You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was reading books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. An artist is a sort of emotional historian.
~ James Baldwin
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Reading time: About 5 minutes, 1000 words
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This issue is https://7forsunday.com/31
It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; A world where we are always moral and our enemies immoral.
~ Saul D. Alinsky
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The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old struggle—the roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your conscience on the other.
~ Douglas MacArthur
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After this era of great pilots is gone, as the era of great sea captains has gone — each nudged aside by the march of inventive genius, by steel cogs and copper discs and hair-thin wires on white faces that are dumb, but speak — it will be found, I think, that all the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it. One day the stars will be as familiar to each man as the landmarks, the curves, and the hills on the road that leads to his door, and one day this will be an airborne life. But by then men will have forgotten how to fly; they will be passengers on machines whose conductors are carefully promoted to familiarity with labelled buttons, and in whose minds the knowledge of the sky and the wind and the way of weather will be extraneous as passing fiction.
~ Beryl Markham from, A Different Solitude: Pioneering Aviator Beryl Markham on What She Learned About Life in the Bottomless Night
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As if there’s anything I could write which would add to that.
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Seek to learn constantly while you live; Do not wait in the faith that old age by itself will bring wisdom.
~ Solon
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And one of my goals as the communicator is to make it as easy as possible for you to get the meaning I’m intending to convey.
~ Shane Parrish from, Language: Why We Hear More Than Words
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The article also has a tidy explanation of irony. Irony (humor, sarcasm and many other linguistic forms) work so well because they are very powerful. A few words said and heard in person can transfer large ideas. The article goes all the way to mentioning our “power to attribute mental states to others.” A subtle and, frankly, amazing power of projection. My mental state, plus your mental state, plus my saying some words, should have gotten you to this other mental state. Heady stuff.
If I wrote, “That was fun.” you’re pretty sure those three words were only part of what the speaker was trying to convey. By default, we have to go with the literal interpretation, but feel we’ve been gypped. We feel the urge to skip back a few lines looking for hints to reveal the rest of the meaning meant to be conveyed. We are accustomed to having to write much more to get the same job done. I have to write: Then, with a wry smile, “That was fun.”
Which is all very interesting. But today, the question I have is: Wait. How did I ever get good at this insanely complex process without ever having anyone explicitly tell me anything about it?
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Humanity has begun to understand that we will all rise or fall together—that we are bound together, as we live together. People are listening more and more to the voice which speaks this inside of us.
~ Lucy Malory
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