It’s not a pretty picture: an economy where high levels of stress and anxiety are normal, where people get ill because they’ve lost control of their time, where marriages are damaged and children suffer. And yet, it’s a picture we’re invited to applaud. Our political leaders idolise “strivers” and “hard-working people”, not “chilled-out, caring dads”, for example.
Kurt taught a Chekhov story. I can’t remember the name of it. I didn’t quite understand the point, since nothing much happened. An adolescent girl is in love with this boy and that boy and another; she points at a little dog, as I recall, or maybe something else, and laughs. That’s all. There’s no conflict, no dramatic turning point or change. Kurt pointed out that she has no words for the sheer joy of being young, ripe with life, her own juiciness, and the promise of romance. Her inarticulate feelings spill into laughter at something innocuous. That’s what happened in the story. His absolute delight in that girl’s joy of feeling herself so alive was so encouraging of delight. Kurt’s enchantment taught me that such moments are nothing to sneeze at. They’re worth a story.
I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be.
More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible. Children need one now… It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity.
Between officially scheduled educational activities, parents look for “teachable moments” while interacting with their children. But the foundation for play is free improvisation, and nothing wrecks play like a hidden agenda from one of the participants.
Speaking of which … this afternoon … the interviewers … I do not know if I will have the time to prepare. I could try to improvise but I believe an interview needs to be prepared ahead of time to sound spontaneous.
The handles of a craftsman’s tools bespeak an absolute simplicity, the plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibilities for the user’s hand.
That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcomes guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace.
What this kind of approach requires, of course, is the willingness to meet the child as an individual. “I had an image of what Charlie ‘should’ be,” one parent says. “I wasn’t keeping my eyes focused on the real boy in front of me.”
He’s also not worried about representing something accurately; he’s actually creating something. So, if he’s drawing a tree, in his mind he’s not creating a drawing of a tree, he’s actually creating the tree. John Baldessari said that everything he knew about drawing he learned from watching children draw.
I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ’If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’
Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique.
You would suddenly find his eyes on you—very blue, very kind and gentle, and even now not stern so much as inflexible
Since people exist only in life, they must devote their time simply to being alive. Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part.
The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.
I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time: some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next; or there’s my way—making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works.
Technology does only one thing – it tends toward efficiency. It has no aesthetics. It has no ethics. Its code is binary.
But everything interesting in life – everything that makes life worth living – happens between the binary. Mercy is not binary. Love is not binary. Music and art are not binary. You and I are not binary.
Years ago, I was habitually late. “I can’t help it!” I declared to an expert in time management. “Have you ever missed a plane?” she asked. I had not. “Then you can help it. You just care more about yourself than about the needs of others.”
Remember that writing is not typing. Thinking, researching, contemplating, outlining, composing in your head and in sketches, maybe some typing, with revisions as you go, and then more revisions, deletions, emendations, additions, reflections, setting aside and returning afresh, because a good writer is always a good editor of his or her own work. Typing is this little transaction in the middle of two vast thoughtful processes.
There could not be two substances in the universe, Spinoza argued, one physical and the other divine, since this involved a logical contradiction. If God and Nature were distinct, then it must be the case that Nature had some qualities that God lacked, and the idea of a supreme being lacking anything was incoherent. It follows that God and Nature are just two names for the same thing, the Being that comprises everything that ever existed or ever will exist.
This is why, Gottlieb observes, people complain that philosophy never seems to be making progress: “Any corner of it that comes generally to be regarded as useful soon ceases to be called philosophy.”
Modernity cannot be identified with any particular technological or social breakthrough. Rather, it is a subjective condition, a feeling or an intuition that we are in some profound sense different from the people who lived before us.
Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing.
The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.
That said, when I am actually procrastinating, it’s usually because at some level I don’t fully believe in (or agree with) whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing. Or maybe it’s because I’m afraid I will fail once I do get to work.
Part of that is knowing when not to work. There is a time for output but also a time for rest, for intake, for seeing what else the world has to offer.