Full owner-ship comes only when you have madeit a part of yourself, and the best wayto make yourself a part of it is bywriting in it.

When people ask Ruefle why she wastes time with the erasures, she has one of the greatest responses I’ve ever heard: “Because it’s fun and I love it. That’s why.”

Make those judgments for your communities, instance by instance, not by network or software. Those sledgehammers are too big and unweildy.

Old graybeards like me still cling to the web, idolizing Yahoo Pipes and posting faux thinkpieces to our tiny blogs.

he province of archeology, a fictional archeologist once said, is the search for facts, not truth.

[Steve Jobs]: If you sort of dig beneath the surface,one of the real successes of the Lisa programwas creating an environment where all these crazy people that could reallybe very, very successful.And I guess that's one of the things that Apple's done best.

Katherine Hayhoe, author of “Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World,” serves as Chief Scientist for the Nature Conservancy and is a distinguished professor at Texas Tech. You might expect that she would be considered a legitimate authority on the subject. p span[style*="font-size"] { line-height: 1.6; } But in the Meta-verse, where it seems virtually impossible to connect with a human being associated with the administration of the platform, rules are rules, and it appears they would prefer to suppress anything that might prove problematic for them. p span[style*="font-size"] { line-height: 1.6; } Hayhoe expressed her personal frustration in a recent post on Facebook. p span[style*="font-size"] { line-height: 1.6; } “Since August 2018, Facebook has limited the visibility of my page,” she writes, “labelling it as ‘political’ because I talk about climate change and clean energy. This change drastically reduced my post views from hundreds to just tens, and the page’s growth has been stagnant ever since.” p span[style*="font-size"] { line-height: 1.6; } The implications of such policies for our democracy are alarming. Why should corporate entities be able to dictate what type of speech or content is acceptable?

ur materials naturally fall into two classes,Materials Camples and literature; they represent oneand the same thing— commodities, the one inconcrete form and the other in abstract form. One is thecommodity and the other describes it.

Our individuality is our greatest asset.

Yet it is doubtful whether since theintroduction of the typewriter there has been an invention so beneficialto modern business as the card-index system.

The progress of the card system in England has•undoubtedly been very slow; a fact which may be due primarilyto the constitutional conservatism of English business men, althoughprobably it is partly accounted for by the natural irritation and reaction•caused by the hustling but not always tactful enthusiasm of the manyAmerican salesmen who for several years past have been its principalmissionaries.

The measure of control is also the measure of responsibility. Respon-sibility without control is a hopeless proposition.

System without consistency is an impossibility. 356But let us realise what a difficult matter it is tobe consistent. We are surrounded by changes and inconsistencieseverywhere. Language above all, which we must needs constantlyuse, is not a perfect instrument for giving expression to consistency.We may have our rules all nicely worded and filed in the key cabinet,but if we have not taken the greatest pains in constructing them,if we have not subjected each one to the most searching criticismbefore they are applied, v/e shall find sooner or later that in one

To run a system effectively, we must be prepared 355Servant to uphold it ourselves, we must give the examplein effective work, we must be the first to submitto it although we supply the directing energy to run it. If we thinkourselves above our own system, then it has already ceased to exist.We must bear in mind therefore that any rules we may make, anyinstructions we may give, any supervision we may effect, applyto ourselves equally with others. We may be the masters of thesystem, we are also its servants, but for all that we need not beslaves to it.

‘speak truth to power,’

A NorthCarolina proprietor, John Colleton, observed in Barbados that poor whiteswere called “white slaves” by black slaves; it struck him that the samecontempt for white field hands prevailed in the southern colonies in NorthAmerica.47

Many contemporaries connected slavery to English idleness. WilliamByrd weighed in on the ban against slavery in Georgia in a letter to aGeorgia trustee. He saw how slavery had sparked discontent among poorwhites in Virginia, who routinely refused to “dirty their hands with Labourof any kind,” preferring to steal or starve rather than work in the fields.Slavery ruined the “industry of our White People,” he confessed, for theysaw a “Rank of Poor Creatures below them,” and detested the thought ofwork out of a perverse pride, lest they might “look like slaves.”

He marveled at how the SouthCarolinians deluded themselves in believing they were safe, burdened asthey were with a large slave population—“stupid security,” he called it.

According to Francis Moore, who visited the settlement in its secondyear of operation, two “peculiar” customs stood out: both alcohol and dark-skinned people were prohibited. “No slavery is allowed, nor negroes,”Moore wrote. As a sanctuary for “free white people,” Georgia “would notpermit slaves, for slaves starve the poor laborer.” Free labor encouragedpoor white men in sober cultivation and steeled them in the event they hadto defend the land from outside aggression. It also promised to cure settlersof that most deadly of English diseases, idleness.41

Likewise, we “trusted the process,” but the process didn’t save Toy Story 2 either. “Trust theProcess” had morphed into “Assume that the Process Will Fix Things for Us.” It gave ussolace, which we felt we needed. But it also coaxed us into letting down our guard and, in theend, made us passive. Even worse, it made us sloppy.

quote from Schopenhauer’s essay, ‘How to think for oneself’, §268:“the most beautiful thought, if not written down, is in danger of being irretrievably forgotten.”It’s from the passage where he observes that Lichtenberg thought for himself in both senses of the phrase, unlike Herder.The original essay, “Selbstdenken” was part of Schopenhauer’s book Parerga und Paralipomena II. Last authorised edition, Erstausgabe Berlin, A. W. Hayn 1851, online textLooks like Povarnin was a Schopenhauer fan!

there’s something really magical about the information density of visuals and graphics, which I would argue is based on the fact that humans are deeply embodied in visual creatures before we were linguistic textural creatures. And so it’s kind of pulling on a much richer, kind of higher bandwidth information channel for us.

scholastic learning would favour externaldemonstration over inner revelation, intellectual agility over endlessmeditation.

‘Blessed Lord, which hast caused al holy Scriptures to bee written forour learnyng; graunte us that we maye in such wise heare them,read, marke, learne, and inwardly digeste them.’2

but they left their own belovedmanuscript unclassied and undescribed, and thus it never attainedthe status of a holding, which it so obviously deserved, and wasinstead tacitly understood to be merely a “nding aid,” a piece offurniture, wholly vulnerable to passing predators, subject tojanitorial, rather than curatorial, jurisdiction—even though thiscatalog was, in truth, the one holding that people who entered thebuilding would be likely to have in common, to know how to usefrom childhood, even to love. A new administrator came by onemorning and noticed that there was some old furniture taking upspace that could be devoted to bound volumes of Technicalities, TheElectronic Library, and the Journal of Library Automation. The cardcatalog, for want of having been cataloged itself, was thrown into adumpster.

Together, over the years, they achieved what one of their earlymasters, Charles Ammi Cutter, called a “syndetic” structure—that is,a system of referential links—of remarkable coherency andresolution.

Virginia Woolf described her childhood at 22 Hyde Park Gate: ‘Ourduties were very plain and our pleasures absolutely appropriate.’ Life wasdivided into two spaces – indoors, in a nursery and a book-lined drawingroom, and outdoors, in Kensington Gardens. ‘There were smells and flowersand dead leaves and chestnuts, by which you distinguished the seasons, andeach had innumerable associations, and power to flood the brain in a second.’

a favourite quotation from Auguste Comte, the founder of altruism,‘Man’s only right is to do his duty. The intellect should always be the servantof the heart, and should never be its slave.’

Abba Eban who was an Israeli politician and diplomat. In March 1967 Eban visited Japan, and the New York Times reported on a remark that he made:[1] 1967 March 19, New York Times, “Japan Welcomes Eban Warmly; Her Industry Impresses Israeli” by Robert Trumbull, Page 14, New York. (ProQuest) Commenting that the passage of time offered the best hope of an end to the problems of Israel and her neighbors, he said: “Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.”

As King put it: "Winston Churchill once famously observed that Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else."

Our Western notion of happiness seems to come from the Greeks,who defined it as “the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellencein a life affording them scope.”15

Thoreau also said that we will be “rich in proportion to the numberof things which we can afford to let alone.”

Aristotle opened hisMetaphysics with the simple statement: “All men by nature desire toknow.”

Now, as then, we are creators of new technologies and stars of theimagined future, driven—this time by great financial rewards andglobal competition—despite the clear dangers, hardly evaluating whatit may be like to try to live in a world that is the realistic outcome ofwhat we are creating and imagining.

In November 1945, three months after the atomic bombings,Oppenheimer stood firmly behind the scientific attitude, saying, “It isnot possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge ofthe world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of in-trinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spreadof knowledge and are willing to take the consequences.”

Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has becomeknown as the “gray goo problem.” Though masses of uncon-trolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term “gray goo”emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less in-spiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superiorin an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable.

If, for ex-ample, we were to reengineer ourselves into several separate and unequalspecies using the power of genetic engineering, then we would threatenthe notion of equality that is the very cornerstone of our democracy.

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.

But lo!men have become the tools of their tools. The manwho independently plucked the fruits when he was hun¬gry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a treefor shelter, a housekeeper.

All men by nature desire to know.

The bad reader is lost amonggood books. He lacks the highest pleasure available to man,according to Mrs. Woolf. If she is right, none but a fool would refuseto learn to read as well as he can.

Reading is not a passive activity

Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelistis doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment withthe dangers and difficulties of words.

Hellinger told how one of the trainers asked the group, "What is more important to you, your ideals or people? Which would you sacrifice for the other?"

My journey is subjective, because it’s my journey.

ZK II note 9/8b 9/8b On the general structure of memories, see Ashby 1967, p. 103 . It is then important that you do not have to rely on a huge number of point-by-point accesses , but rather that you can rely on relationships between notes, i.e. references , that make more available at once than you would with a search impulse or with one thought - has fixation in mind.

in hishistory of such ideas, Darwin Among the Machines, George Dysonwarns: “In the game of life and evolution there are three players at thetable: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side ofnature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines.”

My personal experience suggests we tendto overestimate our design abilities.

You should read with a pen in your hand andenter...short hints of what you feel...may be useful; forthis be the best method of imprinting [them] in yourmemory. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Duke Ellington said that the greatest compliment was to be called “beyond category.”

And everything that I learn, I learn for a particular task, and once it’s done, I immediately forget it, so that if ten years later, I have to – and this gives me great joy — if I have to get involved with something close to or directly within the same subject, I would have to start again from zero, except in certain very rare cases, for example Spinoza, whom I don’t forget, who is in my heart and in my mind.

Everything that I learn, I learn for a particular task, and once it’s done, I immediately forget it, so that if ten years later, I have to—and this gives me great joy—if I have to get involved with something close to or directly within the same subject, I would have to start again from zero, except in certain very rare cases... (The ABC Primer)

By its very nature, moderation is a form of censorship. You, as a community, space, or platform are deciding who and what is unacceptable. In Substack’s case, for example, they don’t allow pornography but they do allow Nazis. That’s not “free speech” but rather a business decision. If you’re making moderation based on financials, fine, but say so. Then platform users can make choices appropriately.

I used to treat my personal website like a content marketer, every post carefully crafted to attract leads that could improve my career or get freelance opportunities. However, it robbed me of a lot of joy. Now, I treat my personal website as my “digital home hub”. I’m much happier as a result.

"In transport, we have progressed from coaches and horses by way of trains to electric traction, motor-cars, and aeroplanes. In mental organization, we have simply multiplied our coaches and horses and livery stables."

“I do all my own research,” she said, “though reviewers have speculatedthat I must have a band of hirelings. I like to be led by a footnote ontosomething I never thought of. I rarely photocopy research materials because, for me, note-taking is learning, distilling. That’s the whole essence ofthe business. In taking notes, you have to discard what you don’t need. If you[photocopy] it, you haven’t chewed it.”

I dislike isolated events anddisconnected details. I really hate state-ments, views, prejudices, and beliefsthat jump at you suddenly out of mid-air.

without a World En-cyclopedia to hold men's minds togetherin something like a common interpreta-tion of reality there is no hope whateverof anything but an accidental and transi-tory alleviation to any of our world trou-bles. As mankind is so it will remainuntil it pulls its mind together. And if itdoes not pull its mind together then I donot see how it can help but decline.Never was a living species more peril-ously poised than ours at the presenttime. If it does not take thoughtto endits present mental indecisiveness catastro-phe lies ahead. Our species may yet endits strange eventful history as just the last,the cleverest, of the great apes. Thegreat ape that was clever-but not cleverenough. It could escape from mostthings but not from its own mental con-fusion.

I believe thatin some such way as I have sketched, themental forces now largely and regrettablyscattered and immobilized in the univer-sities, the learned societies, research in-stitutions, and technical workers of theworld could be drawn together into areal directive world intelligence, and bythat mere linking and implementing ofwhat is known, human life as a wholecould be made much surer, stronger,bolder, and happier than it has ever beenup to the present time.

My impression is that human brains arevery much of a pattern, that under thesame conditions they react in the sameway, and that were it not for tradition,upbringing, accidents of circumstance,and particularly of accidental individualobsessions, we should find ourselves-since we all face the same universe-muchmore in agreement than is superficiallyapparent. We speak different languagesand dialects of thought and can even attimes catch ourselves flatly contradictingone another in words while we are doingour utmost to express the same idea.How often do we see men misrepresent-ing one another in order to exaggerate adifference and secure the gratification ofan argumentative victory!

They don't want their intimate convic-tions turned over and examined, and itis unfortunate that the emphasis put

It is science and not men of sciencethat we want to enlighten and animateour politics and rule the world.

Can scientific knowledge and specializedthought be brought into more effectiverelation to general affairs?

There is no dignityyet in human history. It would be purecomedy if it were not so often tragic, 'sofrequently dismal, generally dishonora-ble, and occasionally quite horrible.

Susan once said she never won against a healthy man. What she meant was that men always had some excuse after losing a game to a woman: "It must have been my headache."

The only advice, indeed,that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, tofollow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your ownconclusions

Some of my better type casts start out as handwritten, though not often. In this mode, the typewriter isn’t a creation platform, more like the publishing medium, which I still prefer over word processed.

"In the general confusion of our time," Febvre wrote, "old ideas refuse to die and still find acceptance with the mass of the population."

Getting over the fear of perfection .t3_188j2xt._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } I have so many half-filled notebooks or ones that I abandoned because I disliked my penmanship or because I “ruined” pages. I am the type of person who will tear out a page if I make a mistake or if it looks bad.I really want to start a commonplace book but I feel like I must get over this fear of “messing up” in a notebook. Anyone else struggle with this?

“You don't read without marking;” it said, “you can't mark without reading.”

he spoke of the ‘historian’s credo’ that ‘the factscrubbed clean is more eternal than perfumed or rouged words’ (Marcus, 1957:466).17

“The schools we go to are reflections of the society that created them. Nobody is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.” ― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

I am proud to have my site as part of The Internet of Unmonetisable Enthusiasms, whether it is mentioned in the article or not.

Not every note box with paper slips in it is a Zettelkasten.

Freudian typo du jour: teachnologies

Temperance Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.

UnmutualOne · 3 days agoAnnotations are my map back into the book.

I use expiration dates and refrigerators to make a point about #AI and over-reliance, and @dajb uses ducks. #nailingit @weareopencoop

If you consult any dictionary you will see that the word“exactitude” is not among the synonyms of faithfulness.There are rather loyalty, honesty, respect, and devotion.Umberto Eco1Although Eco was referring to the translation of literarytexts in the lines above

Frank Luntz, a veteran Republican pollster, disavowed work Thursday in the early 2000s to cast doubt on the science behind climate change and said America, on the whole, wants the federal government to “do more, right now, to address it.” “I was wrong in 2001,” Luntz told an ad-hoc Senate Democratic climate panel. “I don’t want credit. I don’t want blame. Just stop using something that I wrote 18 years ago because it’s not accurate today.”

“This is the science that concerns itself with plants in their local association in the various climates. This science, as vast as its object, paints with a broad brush the immense space occupied by plants, from the regions of perpetual snows to the bottom of the ocean, and into the very interior of the earth, where there subsist in obscure caves some cryptogams that are as little known as the insects feeding upon them.”

One of his most famous students was Alexander von Humboldt, who thanked his mentor Lichtenberg with these words: “I do not merely regard the sum of positive insights that I was able to gather from what you told me – what I value even more is the general direction that my train of thoughts took under your guidance. Truth in itself is precious, but even more precious is the skill to find it.”

They find that exposing populations to lead in their drinking water causes much higher homicide rates 20 years later, relative to similar places where kids avoided such exposure. They find that exposing populations to lead in their drinking water causes much higher homicide rates 20 years later, relative to similar places where kids avoided such exposure.

“A tool to think with, not a tool to publish with” — this seems to me essential. I feel that I spend a lot of time trying to think with tools meant for publishing.

“It’s so freeing, it’s beautiful in a way, to have a great failure. There’s nowhere to go but up.”

Acknowledgement: Great thanks to Chris Aldrich who saw the Quote Investigator article about the saying “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us”. Aldrich notified QI of the germane quotation examined in this new article. Aldrich pointed to its presence in “Walden”. This led QI to create this article and to update the existing article.

Befides, asthe vileft Writer has his Readers, fothe greateft Liarbas his Believers ; and it often happens, that if aLie be believ'd only for an Hour, it has done itsWork, and there is no farther occafion for it. Falfhcod flies, and Truth comes limping after it ; fo thatwhen Men come to be undeceiv'd, it is too late, theJeft is over, and the Tale has had its Effect : Like aMan who has thought of a good Repay per ed . Oh,Repartee, when thelike a Phyfician who has found out an infallible Medicine, after the Patient is dead

at the unveiling of his much-deserved star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles, filmmaker John Waters declared, “God, here I am, closer to the gutter than ever.”

Almost any collection becomes interesting once you get enough stuff in one place,

A thematically similar statement was crafted by Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder in 1871. Here is the original German form together with an English translation:[3]1900, Moltkes Militärische Werke: II. Die Thätigkeit als Chef des Generalstabes der Armee im Frieden. (Moltke’s Military Works: II. Activity as Chief of the Army General Staff in Peacetime) … Continue reading Kein Operationsplan reicht mit einiger Sicherheit über das erste Zusammentreffen mit der feindlichen Hauptmacht hinaus. No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces. Over time Moltke’s statement evolved into a concise adage that circulates widely today: No plan survives first contact with the enemy.

In 1950 Dwight Eisenhower wrote a letter to a U.S. diplomat in which he ascribed a military-oriented version of the saying to an anonymous soldier. Emphasis added to excerpts by QI:[1]1984, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, Volume XI: Columbia University, Editor Louis Galambos et al, Letter from: Dwight Eisenhower, Letter to: Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Date: December 31, 1950, … Continue reading . . . I always remember the observation of a very successful soldier who said, “Peace-time plans are of no particular value, but peace-time planning is indispensable.”

It probably isn’t a coincidence that three is my personal sweet spot, according to Kurt Carlson, a marketing researcher at the College of William & Mary’s Raymond A. Mason School of Business. As far as I can tell, he’s the only person who has done significant research into why and how human brains sort things into groupings of three. “People believe they’re observing something special when they see the third instance of it happen,” he explains.

The Chicago Sun-Times' wandering Newshen Glenna Syse spent 39 minutes with Author James Thurber, left with the conviction that he is "the funniest man alive." In an epigrammatic mood, Thurber ranged free and easy over—by count—39 subjects. Glenna's sampling included a Thurberism on age: "I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were 15 months in every year, I'd only be 48.* That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40." On the forthcoming election: "It's accusation time in Normalcy. And in spite of the nominations, my mother is voting for Lindbergh." On martinis: "One is all right, two is too many, three is not enough."

Nein. Ich habe den Zettelkasten aus der simplen Überlegung her-aus angefangen, daß ich ein schlechtes Gedächtnis habe. Zunächsteinmal hatte ich Zettel in Bücher gelegt, auf die ich mir Notizenmachte, auf diese Weise gingen die Einbände der Bücher kaputt.Dann habe ich mir mit Mappen geholfen, als die jedoch dickerwurden, fand ich nichts mehr in ihnen. Ab 1952 oder 1953 begannich dann mit meinem Zettelkasten, weil mir klar wurde, daß ich fürein Leben planen müsse und nicht für ein Buch.

Im wesentlichen eigene Gedanken, manchmal auch Zitate, aber dasgeschieht ganz selten

Hans Bethe, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967, remarked: “I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann’s does not indicate a species superior to that of man.”

Stallings said, “Does Emily’s clarity betray that element of the epic register that Matthew Arnold calls ‘nobility’? Some critics think a certain grandeur is missing. But every translation is a compromise, even a great one.”

"This," says Aristotle, "is the essence of the plot; the rest isepisode."

The critic Guy Davenport, in a pan of Lattimore, wrote that translation is a game of two languages, and that “the translator is in constant danger of inventing a third that lies between.”

I just try to catch ideas—andsometimes I fall in love with one and then I know what I want to do. Ithas nothing to do with money; just with translating that idea.

Softer than the flower where kindness is concerned,Stronger than the thunder where principles are at stake.VEDIC DESCRIPTION OF THE ENLIGHTENED

You become familiar with the process of catching an idea andtranslating that idea. You understand the tools and the lighting. Youunderstand the whole process—you’ve been through it before.

It’s interesting to seehow these unrelated things live together. And it gets your mindworking. How do these things relate when they seem so far apart? Itconjures up a third thing that almost unifies those first two. It’s astruggle to see how this unity in the midst of diversity could go towork.The ocean is the unity and these things float on it.

If you don’t have a setup, there are many times when you get theinspiration, the idea, but you have no tools, no place to put ittogether. And the idea just sits there and festers. Over time, it will goaway. You didn’t fulfill it—and that’s just a heartache.

Because these religions are old, though, and they’vebeen fiddled with, possibly, I feel some of the original keys from themasters have been lost.

You’ve got to be able to catch ideas.

The idea is the whole thing. If you stay true to the idea, it tells youeverything you need to know, really. You just keep working to make itlook like that idea looked, feel like it felt, sound like it sounded, andbe the way it was. And it’s weird, because when you veer off, yousort of know it. You know when you’re doing something that is notcorrect because it feels incorrect. It says, “No, no; this isn’t like theidea said it was.” And when you’re getting into it the correct way, itfeels correct. It’s an intuition: You feel-think your way through. Youstart one place, and as you go, it gets more and more finely tuned.But all along it’s the idea talking. At some point, it feels correct toyou. And you hope that it feels somewhat correct to others.

An idea is a thought. It’s a thought that holds more than you think itdoes when you receive it. But in that first moment there is a spark. Ina comic strip, if someone gets an idea, a lightbulb goes on. Ithappens in an instant, just as in life.It would be great if the entire film came all at once. But it comes,for me, in fragments. That first fragment is like the Rosetta Stone. It’sthe piece of the puzzle that indicates the rest. It’s a hopeful puzzlepiece.

Ideas are like fish.If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water.But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure.They’rehuge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.I look for a certain kind of fish that is important to me, one that cantranslate to cinema. But there are all kinds of fish swimming downthere. There are fish for business, fish for sports.There are fish foreverything.

LYNCH: Well, for me, ideas—even a fragment—convey everything. In a spark you see images, youhear sounds, you feel a mood. And it becomescomplete, even if it is a fragment. The original ideacomes with a lot of power, and you have to keepchecking back all the way through the process tosee if you are being true to it.

LYNCH: Well, I could say that Dino De Laurentiis cutmy salary and cut the budget, and then gave mefinal cut. So he was into cutting! (

I haven’t caughtthe next idea, either through a book or from theocean of ideas.

LYNCH: No. The whole thing has to make sense toyou, and it has to feel correct. And—but again, it’sbased on these ideas that have been forming andarranging and finally showing you what it is. Andit’s just focusing on those through the process.And if it makes sense, no matter how abstract asense, again it goes back to intuition rather thanjust pure intellect, and something that can be soeasily translated into words by, you know,everyone. Those are beautiful things to me,abstractions. And life is filled with them, andcinema can do abstractions.

LYNCH: No. I think a film is digested ideas andprocesses. If you take from things that have gonethrough that process, you’re further away from thesource. Ideas are the most important things. Andthey seem to be lying there in an ocean andavailable. So if you could go in and get your ownidea—now, it may have similarities to many thingsthat have gone before, but you feel it’s yours, andyou fall in love with it. And that’s a very goodfeeling.

LYNCH: I know we were doing that, but lookingback, it’s a magical process because you can’t tellwhere ideas come from, and it seems like it’s justboth of us focusing on something. And it was acouple of ideas that were fragments, and thosefragments focus you. And it seems that theyrelease a little lock on a door and the door opensand more fragments start coming in—drawn by thefirst fragments. It’s strange, because if any of youhave ever written anything, you know that one dayit’s not there and then a month later or two monthslater it’s there. And it’s two people tuning into thesame place, I think.

LYNCH: Well, I think it’s everyone’s experience thatno matter what, things come to us in fragments.

nobody ever said that reading was easy reading is is 02:25:41 very hard if it weren't hard it wouldn't be worth doing correct and the better the work that you're reading the harder the work is and therefore the more satisfying

this little discussion we're having reminds me of a lecture I once gave many years ago shortly after how to read a book was first published which which I said that I thought that solitary 02:17:34 reading was almost as much advice as solitary drinking

Mehlhorn is determinedly of the view that people can only be motivated by fear: “You cannot get people to vote by getting them to believe that voting and participating will materially improve their lives,” he told Ryan Grim of The Intercept. “What you can get people to get really excited about is: ‘If you participate in politics, you might be able to prevent something really bad from happening to you.’ ”

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance.

All Western philosophy, Whitehead once remarked, is but "a footnote to Plato";and the later Greeks themselves had a saying: "Everywhere Igo in my head, I meet Plato coming back."

"Poetry is more philosophical than history," wrote Aristotle.By this he meant that poetry is more general, more universal.

The ability toretain the child's view of the world, with at the same time amature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremelyrare-and a person who has these qualities is likely to be ableto contribute something really important to our thinking.

"verbalism" is the besetting sin of those who fail to read analytically.

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature.

As Pascal observed three hundred years ago, "When we read too fast or too slowly, we under­stand nothing."

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato . I do not mean thesystematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extractedfrom his writings . I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered throughthem . His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience ata great period of civilization, h is inheritance of an intellectual traditionnot yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made h is writings t aninexhaustible mine of suggestion