âI say I love writing, but really it is thinking I love â that rush of thoughts â new connections in the brain being made. And it comes out of the blue.â O smiled. âIn such moments: I feel such love of the world, love of thinkingâŚâ
The most we can do is to write â intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively â about what it is like living in the world at this time.
You can refine the normal into the sophisticated by pursuing clarity and consistency. Attentiveness turns the normal artful.
Thereâs a reason most people have âthe one who got awayââand why that memory is usually pleasant, rather than painful, though itâs perhaps best left undisturbed. Maybe we donât want to fulfil romantic fantasies, ultimatelyâwe would rather settle for responsible companionship, with far less risk involved.
I don’t swear just for the hell of it. Language is a poor enough means of communication. I think we should all the words we’ve got. Besides, there are damn few words that anybody understands.
It is the duty of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
A giant once lived in that body. But Matt Brady got lost because he looked for God too high up and too far away.
“Why is it, my old friend, that you’ve moved so far away from me?”
“All motion is relative, Matt. Maybe it’s you who’ve moved away by standing still.”
- Go outside and walk in the direction that is the quietest. 2. Continue until youâre in the quietest place possible. 3. Take a moment to absorb it.
Like protons circling a nucleus, the kids grow into themselves but never quite disband from their parents, despite all that movement.
we will begin our story
with the word and
The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all â and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end.
Byron Bartonâs âTrucksâ was a liturgy to us: âOn the road â here come the trucks. They come through tunnels â they go over the bridge.â Those ageless granitic words, night after night, unforgettably.
They blended into one another, not as a writer blends into his pseudonym, but as two writers develop their ideas in partnership â often arguing, often disagreeing, yet constantly absorbing.
They also agreed that the best path to eudaimonia was ataraxia, which might be rendered as âimperturbabilityâ or âfreedom from anxiety.â Ataraxia means equilibrium: the art of maintaining an even keel, so that you neither exult when things go well nor plunge into despair when they go awry. To attain it is to have control over your emotions, so that you are not battered and dragged about by them like a bone fought over by a pack of dogs.
Mindful attention is the trick that underlies many of the other tricks. It is a call to attend to the inner worldâand thus also to the outer world, for uncontrolled emotion blurs reality as tears blur a view.
Variation always solaces, dissolves, and dissipates. If I cannot combat it, I escape it; and in fleeing I dodge, I am tricky.
This is because Montaigne borrows a technique from Plutarch: he constructs his argument by heaping up case studies. Stories and facts spill out in every paragraph like flowers from a cornucopia.
All Montaigneâs skills at jumping between perspectives come to the fore when he writes about animals. We find it hard to understand them, he says, but they must find it just as hard to understand us. âThis defect that hinders communication between them and us, why is it not just as much ours as theirs?â
He started with the Skeptical assumption that nothing was real, and that all his previous beliefs had been false. Then he advanced slowly, with careful steps, âlike a man who walks alone, and in the dark,â replacing these false beliefs with logically justified ones.
As Friedrich Nietzsche would remark centuries later, most of the genuinely valuable observations about human behavior and psychologyâand thus also about philosophyââwere first detected and stated in those social circles which would make every sort of sacrifice not for scientific knowledge, but for a witty coquetry.â
He wrote that they had both decided she should be punished by nothing more than stern words, and even then, âvery gentle ones.â
On a global scale, no single creature can be of much importance, he wrote, yet in another way these Iâs are the only things of importance. And only a politics that recognizes them can offer hope for the future.
Death is only a few bad moments at the end of life, he wrote in one of his last added notes; it is not worth wasting any anxiety over.
âThis great world,â writes Montaigne, âis the mirror in which we must look at ourselves to recognize ourselves from the proper angle.â