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Quoted at some length from Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut: …what great principle or ideal is it that has kept this Union so long together? And I believe that it was not the mere matter of separation of the colonies from the motherland, but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence, which gave liberty to the […]
3.5.2025 10:28A comforting thought in time of afflictionQuoted at some length from a 1930 essay by John Maynard Keynes: When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, […]
16.4.2025 13:14The money motive at its true valueSatisfaction is no more the solution to frustration than certainty is the solution to skepticism. Missing Out by Adam Phillips
2.4.2025 13:26Satisfaction is no more the solutionWhatever genre of political narrative manages to hold our inattention must resonate, first and foremost, on a gut level and be sharply limited in scope and sophistication. We act on electrochemical impulse, rationalize whatever actions we took after the fact, if at all. This isn’t a choice we make, it’s a choice that’s made for […]
1.4.2025 12:59Dear diary…How could I believe that, weak and lacking imagination, I should one day tear myself away, learn a new language, learn a new way of living, like it, lose myself, sever all ties, look back on this which I am riding through as if it were a nightmare told by an idiot in a railroad […]
30.3.2025 13:38As if it were a nightmare told by an idiotRead how Keraouc borrowed (and never returned) a copy of Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. He underscored this short sentence and put a checkmark next to it: The traveler must be born again on the road.
28.3.2025 12:48On the road (quite literally)because the universe is breathing and ever changing on scales that look like eternity to this limited observer
19.3.2025 06:57fragmentFrom The Trouble with Being Born by E.M. Cioran (this morning’s devotional): If I followed my natural inclination, I should blow up the world. And it is because I lack the courage to follow it that, out of penitence, I try to stupefy myself with the company of those who have found peace. Now I […]
14.3.2025 04:53Dear diary…Who was the first man to look at a house full of objects and immediately assess them only in terms of what he could get for them in the market? Surely, he could only have been a thief. Burglars, marauding soldiers, then perhaps debt collectors, were the first to see the world this way. Debt: […]
10.3.2025 13:30Could only have have been a thief1) daring not to need to know for certain. 2) seeing truth as beauty, beauty as truth, and truth as fleeting. 3) active, open, expansive inquiry that does not seek, nor arrive at, anything like definitive answers or a formal definition.
4.3.2025 13:49negative capability, n.⬆️
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