The writer George Saunders, speaking of his own near-death experience, said, âFor three or four days after that, it was the most beautiful world. To have gotten back in it, you know? And I thought, if you could walk around like that all the time, to really have that awareness that itâs actually going to end. Thatâs the trick.”
It was clear now why Yahweh had not struck down the tower, had not punished men for wishing to reach beyond the bounds set for them: for the longest journey would merely return them to the place whence they’d come. Centuries of their labor would not reveal to them any more of Creation than they already knew. Yet through their endeavor, men would glimpse the unimaginable artistry of Yahweh’s work, in seeing how ingeniously the world had been constructed. By this construction, Yahweh’s work was indicated, and Yahweh’s work was concealed.
Lots of being a kid is watching and waiting, and Totoro understands this. When Mei catches a glimpse of a small Totoro running under her house, she crouches down and stares into the gap, waiting. Miyazaki holds on this image: we wait with her. Magical things happen, but most of life happens in between those thingsâand this has a kind of gentle magic of its own.
Toby is a powerful man: in his physicality, in his experiences, in his charisma. But all that power has culminated in gentleness. It is as if that is the point of power: to allow one to access the higher registers of gentleness.
We often think that the empathetic function in fiction is accomplished via the writerâs relation to his characters, but itâs also accomplished via the writerâs relation to his reader.
What is a saint? Someone particularly attentive to things as they are, and extraordinarily accepting of them. Paley honors every person and thing she creates by presenting it at its best, or at least its liveliestâwhich may be the same thing.
Paley understood that just because such language doesnât normally get spoken aloud in the so-called real world, that does not make it unreal, or contrived. On the contrary: language like this is the real language going on in the head of man all the time, whether he can articulate it or not.
We fear that, if we actually could explain our dissertation and book projects to others in simple, but still precise, ways, we might face that most troubling questionââSo what?ââwithout being able to come up with a remotely plausible answer.
I reread my favorite books to make sure theyâre still perfect, but rereading them wears away at their perfection.
The new division in politics is those who favor the current global hegemony and those who are against it. Right and left have been competing to become this new radical anti-status quo party. And so far, in both Europe and America, the right has won.
As for my writing voice in general, well, you get old and your language gets like your shoes or your kitchen gearâyou donât need fancy stuff any more. Youâve learned how to just say it.
A very good book tells me things I didnât know I knew, yet I recognize themâ yes, I see, yes, this is how the world is.
Take it. take it in, take in more every weekend, every day, and quickly it becomes the theater that intrigues, relaxes, fascinates, seduces, and above all expands any mind focused on it. Outside lies utterly ordinary space open to any casual explorer willing to find the extraordinary.
The artist transcends the immediate. Transcends the here and now. Transcends the madness of the world. Transcends terrorism and war. The artist thinks, acts, performs music, and writes outside the framework that society has created. The artist may do no more than give us beauty, laughter, passion, surprise, and drama.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
It seems to me that educated people should know something about the 13-billion-year prehistory of our species and the basic laws governing the physical and living world, including our bodies and brains. They should grasp the timeline of human history from the dawn of agriculture to the present. They should be exposed to the diversity of human cultures, and the major systems of belief and value with which they have made sense of their lives. They should know about the formative events in human history, including the blunders we can hope not to repeat. They should understand the principles behind democratic governance and the rule of law. They should know how to appreciate works of fiction and art as sources of aesthetic pleasure and as impetuses to reflect on the human condition.
On top of this knowledge, a liberal education should make certain habits of rationality second nature. Educated people should be able to express complex ideas in clear writing and speech. They should appreciate that objective knowledge is a precious commodity, and know how to distinguish vetted fact from superstition, rumor, and unexamined conventional wisdom. They should know how to reason logically and statistically, avoiding the fallacies and biases to which the untutored human mind is vulnerable. They should think causally rather than magically, and know what it takes to distinguish causation from correlation and coincidence. They should be acutely aware of human fallibility, most notably their own, and appreciate that people who disagree with them are not stupid or evil. Accordingly, they should appreciate the value of trying to change minds by persuasion rather than intimidation or demagoguery.
Remember that a large number of people become certified or degreed by furnishing other peopleâs answers to other peopleâs questions.
A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.
I shared the geography but not the world
It seemed they were establishing
With such unfussy self-possession, nor
The novels they were writing secretly
That somehow turned to âMumâs old stuffâ.
I opened the front door, and rain was falling. I stood for a few minutes, lost in the beauty of it. Rain has a way of bringing out the contours of everything; it throws a coloured blanket over previously invisible things; instead of an intermittent and thus fragmented world, the steadily falling rain creates continuity of acoustic experience.
This is an experience of great beauty. I feel as if the world, which is veiled until I touch it, has suddenly disclosed itself to me. I feel that the rain is gracious, that it has granted a gift to me, the gift of the world. I am no longer isolated, preoccupied with my thoughts, concentrating upon what I must do next. Instead of having to worry about where my body will be and what it will meet, I am presented with a totality, a world which speaks to me.
What we mourn for the dead is the loss of their hopes.
All paintings, Berger writes in âBrief as Photos,â âare prophecies of themselves being looked atââthey anticipate the viewers who will stand before them, long after they were made. That anticipation collapses distinct moments into one another, defying the absences that time creates.
Personal productivity presents itself as an antidote to busyness when it might better be understood as yet another form of busyness. And as such, it serves the same psychological role that busyness has always served: to keep us sufficiently distracted that we donât have to ask ourselves potentially terrifying questions about how we are spending our days.
It isnât compulsory to earn more money, achieve more goals, realise our potential on every dimension, or fit more in. In a quiet moment in Seattle, Robert Levine, a social psychologist from California, quoted the environmentalist Edward Abbey: âGrowth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.â
Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.