“The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive.”
—Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson in his timeless Kenyon College commencement address, May 20, 1990.“The ultimate irony is that my new novel (West of Babylon) is only available in electronic form. I didn’t merely get hoisted by my own petard—my petard fell on me and shattered my skull. There will be zero chance I’ll ever see anybody reading my book. Zero. It will never, ever happen. I will never be able to sign anyone’s copy. (There won’t be a copy!) I’ll never experience the sheer delight (it has almost reduced me to tears) of walking into a bookstore and seeing a novel I wrote prominently displayed on a table in the front (or rotting away in the H section on a shelf next to Ernest Hemingway and Herman Hesse). There will be friends of mine who, because they’ll never buy an e-reader, will never read the book at all. But what’s crucial, what gives me some infinitesimal measure of hope, is that this book I wrote and slaved over every day and obsessed over for years will still be out there. Wafting in the either, zipping across USB cables, flickering on screens, bubbling up to the surface of the world. The book will be somewhere. I think.”
—Novelist and former “dead-tree loyalist” Ted Heller surrenders to the ebook era. Meanwhile, Patti Smith poignantly admonishes otherwise.
Not many people realise that it is, in fact, the suffering of the child inside them. Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it. So everybody develops a whole armour of secondary self, the artificially constructed being that deals with the outer world, and the crush of circumstances. And when we meet people this is what we usually meet.
Ted Hughes gold (via explore-blog)
Swag and Yolo are now words of stupidity. At first I had nothing against them, but people have pushed their meanings to the limit. Stop trying to act like you’re hardcore with them words, and take off that so called “swag hat”. Swag is not a way of style, it’s a way of showing a fake personality, because you all want is to look cool and Gangsta. Is that your ways of being real? Ha, that is funny, really really funny. I thought being real was staying true to yourself, and I thought it was about staying original, not following some trend of so called Hype. You can finally say that you have swag when you officially learn the lessons of originality.
At some point, keeping a journal was no longer about me. It slowly became about them, you, the readers. I began writing journal entries in preparation for those would come after me; yes, as hubris as it may sound. Much like a time capsule, I am constructing this with the intentions of being found; my words functioning like fossils, waiting to be discovered, marveled over, and critiqued. I assume that I would like to do for others, what other great men have done for me: be of some assistance. President Lincoln once stated that books—and I’m paraphrasing—served the purpose of showing us that the original thought we had, actually isn’t as original as we’d like to think. Didn’t King Solomon tell us that there is nothing new under the sun? So, with regard to the words of Solomon and Abraham, I am inclined to believe that it is my turn. And thats just it, the fact that I believe that I am next in line; the nerve of me to think that I will be of such status and accolades that I will even have counsel to give in the first place. That, right there, is the crux of this entry. This grandiose, lofty pondering; my vision of the future being so magnificent, being so high-minded to the point of being quixotic. Does everyone think like this? Why think like this? Is there truly a disparity in the lives of those who reach for the stars opposed to those who merely gaze at them? I suppose these questions are answerable. However, answers aren’t the objective; provoking your own consideration of these questions is the entire point.
“It may be said that, so far from having a materialistic tendency, the supposed introduction into the earth at successive geological periods of life — sensation, instinct, the intelligence of the higher mammalia bordering on reason, and lastly, the improvable reason of Man himself — presents us with a picture of the ever-increasing dominion of mind over matter.”
—Sir Charles Lyell, 1863The Concept of the Person
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We are human beings, certainly. But we are also persons. Human beings form a biological kind, and it is for science to describe that kind. Probably it will do so in the way that the evolutionary psychologists propose. But persons do not form a biological kind, or any other sort of natural kind. The concept of the person is shaped in another way, not by our attempt to explain things but by our attempt to understand, to interact, to hold to account, to relate. The “why?” of personal understanding is not the “why?” of scientific inference. And it is answered by conceptualising the world under the aspect of freedom and choice. People do what they do because of events in their brains. But when the brain is normal they also act for reasons, knowing what they are doing, and making themselves answerable for it.
[…]
If we bring up our children correctly, not spoiling them or rewiring their brains through roomfuls of digital gadgetry, the sense of responsibility will emerge. They will enter fully into the world of I and You, become free agents and moral beings, and learn to live as they should, not as animals, but as persons. Allow children to interact with real people, therefore, and the grammar of first-person accountability will emerge of its own accord. Undeniably, once it is there, the I-to-you relation adds a reproductive advantage, just as do mathematical competence, scientific knowledge and (perhaps) musical talent. But the theory of adaptation tells us as little about the meaning of “I” as it tells us about the validity of mathematics, the nature of scientific method or the value of music. To describe human traits as adaptations is not to say how we understand them. Even if we accept the claims of evolutionary psychology, therefore, the mystery of the human condition remains. This mystery is captured in a single question: how can one and the same thing be explained as an animal, andunderstood as a person?
”—Nature, nurture and liberal values – a fascinating read on the limits of biology, and a thoughtful take on the ongoing question of what is a person.
Reblog from http://exp.lore.com
About Generosity
Over-giving is not quite the same thing as generosity. Generosity is neither entangling nor aggressive, because the generous person doesn’t expect anything in return.
The over-giver doesn’t expect anything in return either — except to be petted and feted and praised and loved unconditionally for the rest of time (and I was) — so that’s not emotionally loaded. Nothing toxic there!
Confessions of an over-giver from the ever-brilliant Elizabeth Gilbert.
Also see the story of George Price and his quest for the origin of altruism.
Reblog from http://exp.lore.com/
Wear your Happiness
“You must wake up every morning and choose to be happy. You gotta put on happiness like you put on your clothes.”
—14-year-old Khadim Diop at TEDxHarlem, echoing Alfred Hitchcockand millennia of science and philosophy.
Reblog from http://exp.lore.com
