Asceticism and sensuousness
Susan Sontag:
I have never understood asceticism. I have always thought it proceeded from lack of sensuousness, lack of vitality. I’ve never realized that there is a form of asceticism — consisting in simplifying one’s needs and seeking to take a more active role in satisfying them — which is precisely a more developed kind of sensuousness. The only kind of sensuousness I have understood entails love of luxury + comfort.
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The irony of purposeful arguments against the existence of purpose
Alfred North Whitehead:
Many a scientist has patiently designed experiments for the purpose of substantiating his belief that animal operations are motivated by no purposes. He has perhaps spent his spare time in writing articles to prove that human beings are as other animals so that “purpose” is a category irrelevant for the explanation of their bodily activities, his own activities included. Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.
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You do not have my ideas!
Our son was three years old, and he was in the kitchen with me and my wife as we were preparing to eat breakfast one morning. Standing in front of the open refrigerator door, he announced that he would like to have a pickle on his cereal. “That’s not a great idea,” I said. He closed the refrigerator door and turned to face me, planting his feet solidly on the kitchen floor. “You do not have my ideas!” It dawned on me that my relationship with my son had changed rather significantly. “You’re right,” I stammered. “I do not have your ideas. You can put a pickle on your cereal if you like.”
Read moreAn ordinary mind on an ordinary day
Virginia Woolf:
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and simplicity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.
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The violence of climate change
Rebecca Solnit:
Climate change is caused by many human actions, and the solutions are likewise manifold: change how we design our residences, towns and cities, transit systems, agriculture, land management, and overall consumption habits, including food. But the single biggest one is: get over our reliance on fossil fuels. Climate change is itself violence as fires, floods, extreme heat, drought, famine, sea level rise and other catastrophes that both take human life and devastate the natural world. (Environmental historian Rob Nixon published a book in 2011, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, about the way we need to see these undramatic forces that poison, contaminate, undermine, force relocation as violence.) It is violence caused by the powerful minority that has delayed and derailed the decades of efforts to do what the climate requires of us. People die of stuff like the current heat wave (and heat-wave deaths are one of the most undercounted ways we die of climate chaos).
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No time to understand, but plenty of time for righteous wrath
Lionel Trilling:
We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire’s, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, “It is later than you think.” But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time.
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Tribology and phone screen time
This past week I added another word to my vocabulary: tribology. According to the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers, tribology is “the study of surfaces moving relative to one another.” They go on to explain that such study focuses on three related factors in the world: friction, lubrication, and wear. Though I offer this information from the STLE website, that’s not where I learned the term tribology. I learned that word when I picked up Jennifer Vail’s book Friction: A Biography as I was browsing the local independent bookstore. I skimmed a few pages and thought it was very interesting, but resisted the temptation of yet another distraction from the books that I’m currently reading. With some reluctance, I put the book back down on the recent arrivals table.
Read moreScreen time report #4
I’m wrapping up this four-week project with today’s report. It’s a little — but only a little — frustrating to see that my phone use crept up a bit in this final week. I have what I think is a good excuse: my wife and I were both traveling to different places. I was out and about on my own in the city a good bit, and needed to stay in touch. I say that I’m only a little frustrated by this because, as I said last week, I have a different sense of the value of this project now than I had when I began. Though I’m impressed by how much others have lowered the time they spend on their phone — looking at you, Manuel! — I’m really more interested in becoming more deliberate and intentional about when and how I use my phone. Living out such intentions has lowered the amount of time I’ve been on my phone; I’m happy about that, but I see that as a side effect rather than the primary goal.
Read moreTime change and changing times
As I was reading this morning I quite suddenly remembered that time will jump ahead early tomorrow morning, borrowing an hour of my life that will be returned sometime next fall. Knowing that the lost hour will materialize as if out of nothing next fall is little comfort as I contemplate the lost hour of sleep tonight. I remind myself, though, that it’s only an hour of sleep. There was a spring season years ago when the change seemed much more cataclysmic.
Read moreReading a book: the burdens of commitment
Lydia Davis:
…reading a book is a considerable commitment of not only time but also thought and even emotion, especially when you have so many books you have brought into the house, when you seem to buy books even compulsively, out of a hunger for yet another book, and haven’t yet read most of them, when you have acquired so many that although you have many bookcases, in many rooms, there are still books piled on the floor.
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