To be sure, understanding the whole of the universe seems like too grandiose an aspiration when we are continually struggling to understand the tiny subset of the universe that is ourselves.
~ Maria Popova from, https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/04/05/carl-sagan-jonathan-cott-rolling-stone-interview/
slip:4ubaca1.
As with many things Maria Popova creates, anything I add would simply detract. Click. Thank me later.
ɕ
The grandeur of the Declaration of Independence… consists… in its being the perfect way of an action to appear in words. And since we deal here with the written and not with the spoken word, we are confronted by one of the rare moments when the power of action is great enough to erect its own monument.
~ Hannah Arendt from, https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/03/12/hannah-arendt-thinking-without-a-banister-action-happiness/
slip:4ubaha2.
The foundations of the American democracy are unique, regardless wether you think it is a “good” or “bad” construction. If you would like to take your knowledge of it to the next level, I highly recommend, The Constitution.
ɕ
To live with sincerity in our culture of cynicism is a difficult dance — one that comes easily only to the very young and the very old. The rest of us are left to tussle with two polarizing forces ripping the psyche asunder by beckoning to it from opposite directions — critical thinking and hope.
Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. Hope without critical thinking is naïveté.
~ Maria Popova from, https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/02/09/hope-cynicism/
slip:4ubaho2.
Sometimes the best pull-quote is what she quoted from her reading.
Often the best insight is something she herself has written.
Go follow Brain Pickings. Support her work — she’s one of the few wordsmiths building great content on the Internet.
ɕ
One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience. There are always areas of vast silence in any culture, and part of an artist’s job is to go into those areas and come back from the silence with something to say. It’s one reason why we read poetry, because poets can give us the words we need. When we read good poetry, we often say, ‘Yeah, that’s it. That’s how I feel.’
~ Ursula K. Le Guin from, https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/01/30/ursula-k-le-guin-walking-on-the-water/
slip:4ubauu1.
In the beginning, I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey — no, I’m not old enough to have seen it in the theater, thank you — and, in all honesty, I did not understand most of it. Later, I learned about the story, read the related books, etc.. I rewatched the movie and began a long period of wielding my understanding as a badge of pride. (“I understand 2001! Here, let me show it to you. Let me explain it to you.”) I eventually went on to learn to play the Blue Danube on the piano because the piece is so prominent and moving in the film.
… cross-fade …
Very recently, I saw a solar eclipse and I wished someone had queued up Also sprach Zarathustra — whose introduction, by the way, still gives me shivers. It would have been sublime to have had totality begin just as the creshendo strikes in the opening . . .
I digress.
Also sprach Zarathustra is a tone poem and after the eclipse — perhaps in search of that sublime moment missed — I took the time to listen to it in its entirety.
…and that led me to adjust my living room for optimal viewing
…to crank up the volume
…and to cue up 2001.
It was just as awe-inspiring as I recalled. Just as awe-inspiring as I’d hoped.
…and then I read this piece — from the perennianlly stellar Brain Pickings — about le Guin’s conception of art.
Something clicked and I gained a new appreciation for the film: “Yeah, that’s it. That’s how I feel.”
ɕ
One of the most fascinating portions of her treatise, for it applies to nearly every aspect of life in every era at every level of society, deals with the complex ecosystem of talent, ambition, and success — what we do with our talent, what others make of our success, and how to cope with one of the ugliest impulses of the human heart: the small-spirited urge to tear down those who have risen to prominence by their own merit.
~ Maria Popova from, https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/01/08/germaine-de-stael-passions-happiness-glory/
slip:4ubage1.
Two centuries old (ie, very new). There’s nothing new under the sun (at least, in terms of the crap humans do wrongly ;)
ɕ
It has been a difficult year — politically, personally. Through it all, I have found solace in taking a more telescopic view — not merely on the short human timescale of my own life, looking back on having lived through a Communist dictatorship and having seen poems composed and scientific advances made under such tyrannical circumstances, but on far vaster scales of space and time.
~ Maria Popova from, https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/12/21/reflection/
slip:4ubare1.
Not sure what it is about this winter, but I’m finding it notably harder to knuckle-down and dig in to prepare for 2018. Normally, the dreary winter months are generally depressing, but it’s the sort of dreary that “cozy up with a good book by the fire (and maybe some good Scotch)” takes care of. But this winter. meh I’ve got a lot of sorting out to do yet for 2018.
ɕ
Unlike the other townspeople, who are constantly doing things together, he is content in his own company — a perfect embodiment of the great film director Andrei Tarkovsky’s advice to the young.
Most of all, the boy cherishes his time with Bertolt — the ancient oak he loves to climb.
~ Maria Popova from, https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/05/12/bertolt-jacques-goldstyn/
slip:4ubabe1.
Trees.
More recently I’ve been drawn more strongly to photographing them, standing under them and just generally appreciating them.
ɕ
Forty years after the Voyager sailed into space, we seem to have lost sight of this beautiful and sobering perspective, drifting further and further into our divides, fragmenting our fragile home pixel into more and more warring factions, and forgetting that we are bound together by the improbable miracle of life on this Pale Blue Dot and a shared cosmic destiny.
~ Maria Popova from, https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/11/29/here-we-are-oliver-jeffers/
slip:4ubahe3.
Also quoted in this piece is Carl Sagan’s original commentary on the “pale blue dot”. Gets me every time.
ɕ
Freedom is the capacity to pause in the face of stimuli from many directions at once and, in this pause, to throw one’s weight toward this response rather than that one.
The pause is especially important for the freedom of being, what I have called essential freedom. For it is in the pause that we experience the context out of which freedom comes. In the pause we wonder, reflect, sense awe, and conceive of eternity. The pause is when we open ourselves for the moment to the concepts of both freedom and destiny.
~ Rollo May from, “Freedom and Destiny”
Check out Maria Popova’s, “Existential Psychologist Rollo May on Freedom and the Significance of the Pause”
https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/10/04/rollo-may-freedom-destiny-pause/
slip:4ubaro1.
…and my favorite season is here! I love the cool evenings, and how the knowledge that Daylight Savings is about to kick in makes me pay extra attention to my time outdoors in the evening. One thing I love doing is walking while listening to podcasts where I often find inspiring gems.
Here’s an example from The Tim Ferris Show Episode #86
https://tim.blog/2015/07/05/stanley-mcchrystal/
slip:4utisa1.
Around 1 hour 20 miutes in, Chris Fussell says:
I had a great mentor of mine, early on in my carrer, say, you should have a running list of three people — you can but you don’t need to share it with them or the world — that you’re always watching: Someone senior to you that you want to emulate; A peer who you think is better at the job than you, and you respect; And someone subordinate who is doing the job that you did a year or two or three years ago better than you did it. If you just have those three individuals that you’re constantly measuring yourself off of, and who you’re constantly learning from, you’re going to be exponentially better.
~ Chris Fussell
slip:4c2le2b.
Aside: DST should be abolished. It no longer saves us energy (it’s original purpose), but it does cause a statistically significant rise in traffic accidents:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199604043341416
(that’s the actual New England Journal of Medicine mind you.)
ɕ
Yet whatever one calls it, we share a rough idea of what’s meant: a lasting sense of one’s self moving in a sea of selves, dependent yet alone; a sense, or perhaps a deep and common wish, that I somehow belongs to we, and that this we belongs to something even larger and less comprehensible; and the recurring thought, so easy to brush aside in the daily effort to cross the street safely and get through one’s to-do list, much less to confront the world’s true crises, that my time, our time, matters precisely because it ends.
~ Alan Burdick from, https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/09/04/alan-burdick-why-time-flies-empathy/
slip:4ubaaa2.
ɕ
And now, somehow, a decade has elapsed.
Because I believe that our becoming, like the synthesis of meaning itself, is an ongoing and dynamic process, I’ve been reluctant to stultify it and flatten its ongoing expansiveness in static opinions and fixed personal tenets of living. But I do find myself continually discovering, then returning to, certain core values. While they may be refined and enriched in the act of living, their elemental substance remains a center of gravity for what I experience as myself.
~ Maria Popova from, https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/10/23/10-years-of-brain-pickings/
slip:4ubaye1.
Maria Popova’s site “Brain Pickings” is one of the true delights of the Internet. Take a few minutes to click over and see.
ɕ
…a genius is simply a person who originates something never known before. Nobody but Melville could have written Moby-Dick, not even Whitman or Shakespeare. Nobody but Whitman could have written Leaves of Grass; Whitman was born to write Leaves of Grass and Melville was born to write Moby-Dick.
~ Jack Kerouac from, http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/17/are-writers-born-or-made-jack-kerouac/
slip:4ubaae1.
ɕ
This distinction holds for adult reading too. The dangerous fantasy is always superficially realistic. The real victim of wishful reverie does not batten on the Odyssey, The Tempest, or The Worm Ouroboros: he (or she) prefers stories about millionaires, irresistible beauties, posh hotels, palm beaches and bedroom scenes—things that really might happen, that ought to happen, that would have happened if the reader had had a fair chance. For, as I say, there are two kinds of longing. The one is an askesis, a spiritual exercise, and the other is a disease.
~ C.S. Lewis from, http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/06/18/c-s-lewis-writing-for-children/
slip:4ubaie2.
ɕ
And so we get to the so-called “OK Plateau” — the point at which our autopilot of expertise confines us to a sort of comfort zone, where we perform the task in question in efficient enough a way that we cease caring for improvement. We reach this OK Plateau in pursuing just about every goal, from learning to drive to mastering a foreign language to dieting, where after an initial stage of rapid improvement, we find ourselves in that place at once comforting in its good-enoughness and demotivating in its sudden dip in positive reinforcement via palpable betterment.
~ Maria Popova from, http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/10/17/ok-plateau/
slip:4ubaie5.
ɕ
“In the field of observation,” legendary disease prevention pioneer Louis Pasteur famously proclaimed in 1854, “chance favors only the prepared mind.” “Knowledge comes form noticing resemblances and recurrences in the events that happen around us,” neuroscience godfather Wilfred Trotter asserted. That keen observation is what transmutes information into knowledge is indisputable — look no further than Sherlock Holmes and his exquisite mindfulness for a proof — but how, exactly, does one cultivate that critical faculty?
~ Maria Papova from, http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/03/29/the-art-of-observation/
slip:4ubaie6.
ɕ
We, like all living things, want to live on — we want to project ourselves into the future, we have this will to live. And yet, unlike other living things, we have to live in a knowledge that this will is going to be thwarted, that we’re going to die. And so we might have to live with this sense of personal apocalypse — the worst thing that could possibly happen, will. This is what it means to be mortal.
~ Maria Popova from, http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/24/the-philosophy-of-immortality/
slip:4ubaie7.
ɕ