Those who recall making an error in beauty inevitably describeone of two genres of mistake. The Šrst, as in the lines by Dickin-son, Shakespeare, and Hopkins, is the recognition that somethingformerly held to be beautiful no longer deserves to be so regarded.The second is the sudden recognition that something from whichthe attribution of beauty had been withheld deserved all along tobe so denominated. Of these two genres of error, the second seemsmore grave: in the Šrst (the error of overcrediting), the mistake oc-curs on the side of perceptual generosity, in the second (the error ofundercrediting) on the side of a failed generosity.

ask people (friends, stu-dents) to describe an error they have made about beauty.

This willingness continually to revise one’s own location in or-der to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse un-derlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers)in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the rightdirection when a comet suddenly cuts through a certain patch ofsky. The arts and sciences, like Plato’s dialogues, have at their cen-ter the drive to confer greater clarity on what already has clear dis-cernibility, as well as to confer initial clarity on what originally hasnone. They are a key mechanism in what Diotima called begettingand what Alexis Tocqueville called distribution. By perpetuatingbeauty, institutions of education help incite the will toward con-tinual creation

Beauty Prompts a Copy of ItselfThe generation is unceasing. Beauty, as both Plato’s Symposium andeveryday life conŠrm, prompts the begetting of children: whenthe eye sees someone beautiful, the whole body wants to reproducethe person. But it also—as Diotima tells Socrates—prompts thebegetting of poems and laws, the works of Homer, Hesiod, andLycurgus.

your captured toolkit, I hope you can see through this that it's not one kind of tool

Resonance is an internal feeling of being moved or enlivened or excited by, by an idea you encounter. It's your intuition speaking, telling you that there is something special about what you're seeing.

it something that could inspire you in the future?

I recommend a different metaphor for our relationship to information, fishing nets. Instead of waiting until the moment you need to know something and going out and hunting down an answer, you just place your nets into the information stream and you wait for the fish to arrive.

What do you think of it? What are the implications? What does it mean? And third, it's difficult to find the best sources of information through on-demand searching. Google has become a giant game of search engine optimization. It doesn't usually show you the best content.

First, you can't find something you don't know to look for. You can really only search for something you already know that you need, or that you want. Often you don't even know the right question ask. You don't even know oftentimes what you don't know. Second, you can't edit or annotate what you find. You can't add so much as an underline or highlight until you bring that content into an environment that you control. You can't add your own perspective, your own lens.

It is about making individual notes the most prominent actors, like discrete atoms that can be assembled into any form.Design is always about balancing priorities — in this case: comprehensiveness and compression.

If we consider these periods of intense, focused work as our primary asset as knowledge workers, and think about how precious few hours of quality attention we have to spend each week, and how few weeks and years we have on this planet to make something that matters, it is unforgivable that we make no effort to build a knowledge base that appreciates over time. Each day we start again from scratch, trading something invaluable for something merely valuable.

Soft systems are ideal for“Systems involving people holding multiple and conflicting frames of reference.And for“…understanding motivations, viewpoints, and interactions.”

We know from neuroscience research that “emotions organize — rather than disrupt — rational thinking.” Often, when something “resonates” with us, it is our intuitive/right brain/System 1 mind telling us something is valuable before our analytical/left brain/System 2 mind even knows what’s going on.

“We need to spend more time engaged in deep work — cognitively demanding activities that leverage our training to generate rare and valuable results.”

A big part of the problem is that, as Cal Newport says, “knowledge workers dedicate too much time to shallow work — tasks that almost anyone, with a minimum of training, could accomplish.”

We don’t know what we know, because this information, which we’ve spent precious time and attention to absorb, remains disconnected, fragmented, and scattered. The seeds of insight hide in mysteriously titled folders and documents, opaque black boxes floating in the cloud.

“You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”

By externalizing your ideas in a variety of formats — text, sketches, photos, videos, documents, diagrams, webclips, hyperlinks — you create a system of distributed cognition across “artifacts” that can be moved, edited, rearranged, and combined.

In general, you should try to write the note with enough clarity so that a stranger could read it and understand it.

I let myself go up to 500 words per note

There is an atomic nature to notes in the Zettelkasten. Each note should contain just a single idea.

There shouldn’t be anything in your project’s section unless you are actively working on it. Even the other sections are also meant to be pruned on a regular basis so that they only represent your primary interests. A good rule of thumb: if any folder gains more notes than you can easily skim (~50-100 notes), it might be time to split that folder into two or maybe even delete some notes.

Not making your second brain cognitively overwhelming is an under-emphasized part of the PARA system.

Things related to projects you’re actively working on. Don’t store triviaStore things that surprise you: Don’t store stuff you already knowA 12 select problems that you love to think about

Progressive Summarization

Now you’ve reset the notes to be discoverable the next time you need them.

With P.A.R.A. you organize all your notes by purpose, not by category.

Next I came across the Zettelkasten note taking method. Its core idea is to create atomic notes, where each note is about exactly one topic (not more than a few paragraphs tops) and nothing more.

Baldwin

Reading Research Quarterly

Baldwin

A man, to give his own soul to the devil is lost A man with a title and intelligence is the cost A conscience with a regret and many desires A conscience fooled by known liars A body in this deal is left in this trend A body without a soul, is it worth it at the end

My mind is where his last words stayed

But first I must meet with the Dark King How To Summon the Devil Draw Satan’s star in the blood of a goat

Heart racing, blood streaming hot with my body sweating

lightly

I see that I want power

I just love young and healthy flesh, it is so refreshing!

It is a classic and adding a little human to it makes it far better than any old chocolate or vanilla pudding.

humans battle a fever for days at a time

I recently had the opportunity to sit down and discuss my occupation with the young and striking Margaret Cavendish.

liced and remove excess fat

you can even collect those who have drowned at sea which have already begun to pickle!

writing a poem isn’t exactly like Wordsworth’s emotion recollected in tranquility. The nurse’s approach might be described as professional barriers to emotion dismantled out of poetic necessity.

They are present at moments of human vulnerability. At the same time, the work that nurses do—often so close to our pain as to breathe the very air of it—demands a discipline that limits access to emotion.

“Call them simply writers who happen to have unusual access to us.”

more likely to be narrative, to appeal to the senses, to be attentive to the human body in ways that are knowing, and authoritative.

a working life that requires an intimacy with human suffering the likes of which no other profession requires.

illness, birth, dying and death, suffering and healing.

when nurses write poems, they quite often are writing about their working lives,

Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture

what is it about the body of work written by nurses—as a distinct group—that is worth our attention?

ne of the more extreme and paradoxical examples of the alienated modern artist.

simplify themselves into the conventional image of poet.

But in truth I’m a poet who happens to be a nurse.

a thing that flares apart in the tumult, a thing that surrenders to the wind. 

The blisters have healed, the bruises have faded, the evidence has vanished

he watches the white petals tremble, and, in a gust, a single blossom is torn off a branch.

eaves on the trees, and wild-magnolia blossoms on the branches

Don’t touch my boy! Mateo!” A

Alicia and her daughter are released. Marta is sent back. She doesn’t see Esme again.

She loses track of the dots. She loses track of herself.

Her heart pounds. She can hear the echo of it deep in her ears,

They were separated along the way, overnight, a few days ago. The man who was leading them here divided the group.

She looks at the woman—she can’t help it—with delirious hope

Esme lost her baby.

People outside hold signs that say “ILLEGAL IS A CRIME” and “SEND THEM BACK WITH BIRTH CONTROL.” People hold American flags over their shoulders like capes. Superhero Americans.

Often now, she wants to scream. Sometimes she does, and then the guards come to restrain her. They hold her arms behind her back.

She clenches her fists. She digs her nails into her palms, determined not to cry.

And you’re pretty.

Tell me everything. They’ll need to determine if you qualify for asylum

Everything is far from here

They sleep in the bed together. They shower together. The girl won’t leave her mother’s side.

Don’t let yourself give way.

What if everything fails, and getting through life is simply learning to cope with the failure?

What i

A boy who looks like me?

When the weather turns cold

Periodically, new people arrive, escorted by border-patrol agents. A few every week.

She marks the days on her arm. A small dot on the inside of her wrist becomes a trail, then a winding chain.•

Hash browns and syrup for breakfast. Chicken broth and French fries for lunch. Turkey cutlets and potato dumplings for dinner. So many potatoes. It’s a world made of potatoes. There is water to drink, but it tastes like chlorine, and it makes her nauseous.

Gabriel Rivas

a chain-link fence topped with a confection of barbed wire and, just beyond it, an open field speckled with wildflowers and long grass and a few broad trees.

It’s a warehouse, this place: cement floors, fluorescent tube lights in the ceiling, flyers taped to the painted cinder-block walls—ads for phone services, for immigration attorneys, for psychologists.

.

her husband died four years ago.

The sound of her laughter blooms in the dark.

They’re stacked neatly in bunk beds, like bodies in a morgue, and she stares at the bowing mattress above her, the straining metal coils, worried that they will not hold.

Dora the Explorer

eight-year-olds curled against the bars

He’s five years old. He has black hair, parted on one side, and a freckle, right here, under his eye. He was wearing a Spider-Man shirt.

“¿Mi hijo?”

What he meant was that they were there to take care of him. Four women. Which they did.

back of his hand, swift to the jaw.

They tell her to sleep, but that can’t be right.

a broken sandal strap, sunburn on her cheeks, mud in her ears, bugs in her hair, blisters around her ankles, bruises on her hips, boiled eggs, bottled water, sour berries, pickup trucks and train cars and footsteps through the dirt, sunrises and sunsets,

n the first day

She was going to tell them something, the thing she has learned, but already it is draining from her, disappearing like water poured over sand

Her name is Julia.

Jonathon

he should have been asked

But, when he does die, it is the Mother beside him.

It is the Mother’s choice to walk this narrow path of unbelief, and to sit alone with the Son in the depths of the night.

He is exactly Attila’s height and build, the Mother notes, their heads bend together above all the other heads, the tallest trees.

Another tumour picks him up like a pillow

One tumour is an electric storm: i

The tumours cannot eat chess,

“Yes,” says the Mother, “It’s a terrible feeling.”

I internalised your response.

the Baby has a chemical effect on the Mothers’ vision

after some days of laughing the tumour shrank and disappeared

I am actually this angry with hospitals. I really do hate you. You are not doing anyone any good and I do not give you permission to put your fingers in my brain.”

bore holes or storm systems or black beetles

Mother/Grandmother.

dandelion head.

a November guy.

liquid dark eyes

There are girls, now, and here is one beside him, importantly holding his hand.

he is bonily handsome

the Son now goes to university.

It is she who owes him his, in the same way you owe a child a good picnic, when it is your idea to set out, and you who forgot the map, and now you are lost and there is no hope ever of the rain turning off.

Zopiclone

Edwards Syndrome.

She is thinking about her love for her son. It was born at the same time as him, and she is not in control of it

How can it be an impulse?” hisses the Mother, furiously, “to bypass six security systems?”

She doesn’t know why

Acute General

and daringly the Mother takes his hand

White Fang

Robert Louis Stevenson

You’re alive in your mind, that’s the thing. The life of the mind.”

scents danger.

We’ve got the technology now. And cos we have the technology, we have to save her.

So is genetics, and blame.

the new guy

Once, the Son was prodigious and original, and the Mother was daffy and whacky, and they were on the same side

EFL oral exams

So would I

she fears sick things:

Do Something

A Not-Dead.”

large, glittering brown eyes

biro drawings

the sun is streaming in

one thing.

sounds carry weight and travel in waves

karst

Give him a reason to come back to us,

Same.”

She can hear the Creole news broadcast blasting from the radio that’s always on in her parents’ apartmen

Wild Is the Wind

. The night nurse won’t say, perhaps so she and others don’t storm the building

he seemed to be saying under the face mask,

He could still breathe on his own then

But first they had to go on the delayed honeymoon to her namesake cave.

Flatbush Avenue restaurant

“What did you two spend the night talking about?” the morning nurse asks.

his racing breath

Who would I have to dress as to be able to see you, and fight for you, with you?

her mother was born, in the south of Haiti

while the language they’ve been hearing since birth slowly slipped away.

so striking they could burn your pupils with their beauty

he’d no longer use that particular word

Maybe not in Brooklyn,

nd replicate the motion countless times over the years, giving herself pleasure, j

the hand itself,

it seemed as if all she had ever learned on the job came into play as she spoke soothingly to him, making a gentle patting motion on his back, the kind of gesture you’d use to calm a baby at night—a gentle repeated pat, not too soft and not too hard.

He nudged her awake and explained that he was the one who’d gone trigger happy on the old lady in Fallujah

and when she made that sound he made it, too

an airless freedom

forgetting his scars

craterlike hollow

A hit could come as easily as a kiss.

all she had—she sometimes felt—was the small accumulations, one upon the next, because the past had taught her to take care with all of that, to be frugal with matters of the heart.

and let Marlon see in her face the things she wanted him to see, that she had suffered at the hands of Roy.

because she always had one bottled up, at bay, and that was part of the dynamic, the urge to talk to him, and to hear him talk back.

Go back to how, after she’d told Marlon about the dentist, an old couple appeared between the sliding doors and began a slow, shuffling walk across the parking lot, holding each other up, and how he paused (holding off on the nursing lecture) and said, How did Curt die? He said it before she could tell him the fact. Not so much guessing as seeming to have a prophetic insight. And she said, Hey, how’d you know?, and he shrugged and looked away and listened as she explained that Curt had jumped from a bridge, and then, right then, the wind lifted and litter skittered and an E.M.S. came into the emergency bay and across the street there was the high, metallic, and beautiful sound of kids playing before she began to cry.

NoWait, there were a lot of other conversations, late in the summer and early in the fall,

gazing up at the stars

I think this here is probably the loneliest road in America, and they headed out of town,

he desolation of Newburgh

Up the old state road

he took care with matters of the heart, the past having taught her that a hit could come as easily as a kiss.

ncinerated aftermath of old bandages and bloodied towels, afterbirths and whatever else could be burned to save the hospital disposal fees.

the early-autumnal sky

she pulled him close.

the sounds of summer,

My grandmother had rheumatoid arthritis,

His eyes were painfully green as the grief twisted his face and the trees near the road gave off a sugary odor and tenderness formed in the quiet.

he began to talk again about the impulse to kill

how fucking easy it would be to save the kid from suffering

She had this hangup about being from the West, and then there she was, living in Newburgh, New York.

my mom used to say.

Wolf could bring people back to life but he didn’t do it, because there’d be too many people in the world if he did.

Marlon

the clean, raw rotation of the stars

her mother had travelled around a lot, following one asshole after another, and she got used to it

Changing bedpans and lifting armrests and holding shoulders, checking charts, slipping little baggies over the tips of thermometers, inserting I.V. needles.

He resistedGiving her the standard nurse-to-nurse talk