💬 Quotes
💬 From The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt:
What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience.
It’s a good day to introduce yourself to neighbors. 🙂
🖊️ My older brother, a city councilman in Oregon, wrote an open letter to government officals expressing his serious concern over the overreach of ICE in his state:
An agency that operates outside constitutional boundaries forfeits its legitimacy as a law enforcement institution. An agency that disregards due process, lawful authority, and civil protections becomes a risk to public safety, not a guarantor of it.
Excellent reminder of the constitutional rights at stake and the legal precedent that undergirds them. Please take time to read the whole thing.
💬 Was reminded of this today, from Rilke in Letters To A Young Poet:
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything.
Long live everything!
💬 Geez— one of the best explanations of the process of writing, from Karl Ove Knausgaard:
For several years I had tried to write about my father, but had gotten nowhere, probably because the subject was too close to my life, and thus not so easy to force into another form, which of course is a prerequisite for literature. That is its sole law: everything has to submit to form. If any of literature’s other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these overtake form, the result suffers. That is why writers with a strong style so often write bad books. That is also why writers with strong themes so often write bad books. Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called “writing.”
💬 Quote by Elizabeth Peabody, per Austin Kleon’s newsletter:
The perilous time for the most highly gifted is not youth. The holy sensibilities of genius — for all the sensibilities of genius are holy — keep their possessor essentially unhurt as long as animal spirits and the idea of being young last; but the perilous season is middle age, when a false wisdom tempts them to doubt the divine origin of the dreams of their youth; when the world comes to them, not with the song of the siren, against which all books warn us, but as a wise old man counselling acquiescence in what is below them.
💭 Listened to a remarkable conversation with Karl Ove Knausgaard & Zadie Smith from 2019 that was too good not to share:
I wasn’t aware the book was about shame, because I am so full of shame—and that was the way I thought the world was. But I’m very interested in shame because that’s the point where kind of the outer world and the social world enters the inner world and inner self. And that’s what’s the stake in this book is, it’s the division between the inner and the outer— and the shame is the outer world being in you.
💬 A great quote, brought to my attention by @robertbreen :
Poetry is language against which we have no defenses. — David Whyte
💬 Since I made a New Years post about Auden’s poem Under Which Lyre, I’d be remiss not to mention a different poem of his, New Year Letter, on this day as well. Here is the opening:
Under the familiar weight Of winter, conscience and the State, In loose formations of good cheer, Love, language, loneliness and fear, Towards the habits of next year, Along the streets the people flow, Singing or sighing as they go: Exalte, piano, or in doubt, All our reflections turn about A common meditative norm, Retrenchment, Sacrifice, Reform.
✍️ From a quick blog post of mine called Patience Is (Still) A Virtue:
I am convinced that humans are meant to live in reality, not fiction, and all spiritual health is predicated on the condition that we be faithful to the world as it is rather than as we wish it to be. An ounce of delusion costs a gallon of resilience—and rejecting what we know to be true will always be experienced by our spirit as a defeat.
Would love to know your thoughts!
💬 A charming quote from RuPaul, as told to me by a friend:
“We’re all born naked and the rest is drag.”
💬 “Write, for example, ‘The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'”
📚 An adorable and seasonally appropriate poem from my current read, Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency:
💬 Ten pages into Christmas Memory by Truman Capote and absolutely captured by this man’s prose:
Dollar bills, tightly rolled and green as May buds. Somber fifty-cent pieces, heavy enough to weight a dead man’s eyes. Lovely dimes, the loveliest coin, the one that really jingles. Nickels and quarters, worn smooth as creek pebbles. But mostly a hateful heap of bitter-odored pennies. Last summer others in the house contracted to pay us a penny for every twenty-five flies we killed. Oh, the carnage of August: the flies that flew to heaven! Yet it was not work in which we took pride.
💬 Christmas is such a generous season, which always makes me think of one of my favorite passages in Paradise Lost:
Well we may afford Our givers their own gifts, and large bestow From large bestowd, where Nature multiplies Her fertil growth, and by disburd’ning grows More fruitful, which instructs us not to spare.
💬 From Dorothy Day:
What we would like to do is change the world—make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute—the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words—we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world.
💬 An observation from Ivan Illich in Right To Useful Unemployment (1978) which feels especially pertinent in the age of LLMs:
Fifty years ago, most of the words heard by an American were personally spoken to him as an individual, or to someone standing nearby. Only occasionally did words reach him as the undifferentiated member of a crowd - in the classroom or church, at a rally or circus. Words were mostly like handwritten, sealed letters, and not like the junk that now pollutes our mail. Today, words that are directed to one’s person’s attention have become rare… This replacement of convivial means by manipulative industrial ware is truly universal, and is relentlessly making the New York teacher, the Chinese commune member, the Bantu schoolboy, and the Brazilian sergeant alike.
💬 My coworker dropping some accidental wisdom this AM:
“Remember, as strange as it sounds, a dull knife is the most dangerous kind of knife.”
MAINTENANCE is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going. Every living thing spends a great deal of time and toil in maintaining its own life and the life of the systems it depends on… But so much of doing maintenance is tiresome. The apparent paradox is profound: Maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional. It it easy to put off, and yet it has to be done…. When you take responsibility for something, you enter into a contract to take care of it. If it’s a child, to keep it fed. If it’s a knife, to keep it sharp.
Thanks to @snarfed for the discovery. I recommend the full passage.
💬 Prodigal Son by James Weldon Johnson (1927)
