This pretty much encapsulates my recent meditation on human intelligence being finite, despite our capitalist-accumulation-inspired beliefs in socially progressive wisdom and standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants.
That intellectual progress is merely a rearrangement of the furniture, a making space for new things by forgetting much of the old. We are still dumbfounded at how ancient Egyptians created the pyramids, resorting to theories about aliens, merely because we cannot resolve the cognitive dissonance in the lineage between ancient and modern Egyptians.
Love the idea of amulets of pearls Mr. Sacasas. I keep a book full of quotes and wisdom (amulets or pearls) that I refer back to from time to time. "Gleanings from my reading" to use a more agricultural term.
Here are a few for the Agrarian minded among us:
"If we want to save the land, we must save the people who belong to the land. If we want to save the people, we must save the land the people belong to." - Wendell Berry.
"I really only want to say that we may love a place and still be a danger to it." - Wallace Stegner.
"Nothing is more symptomatic of rural decay than the cleavage in every direction between beauty and utility." - H.J. Massingham.
"The real test of the qualities of a smallholder arrises during a depression." - C.H. Gardiner
"To be healthy is literally to be whole; to heal is to make whole." - Wendell Berry
"Not blind opposition to progress, but position to blind progress" - Jon Muir
"Not necessary revival of old practices, but of old values." - Anon (comment at a recent localist book festival).
I have many more of these. People can message or email me if they want some more.
I love this from President Abraham Lincoln: “The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty.”
I recite this frequently to remind people that terms like “freedom” and “liberty” are meaningless in the absence of context.
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” - Yeats
“Sometimes, a hypocrite is nothing more than a man who is in the process of changing.” - Brandon Sanderson
“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.” - David Graeber
“Imagine others complexly.” - John Green. Although I hear the phrase most often these days from YouTube Dungeon Master Matthew Colville, who is quoting John.
"Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for such is the kingdom of God." - Jesus Christ
I can think of no better principle to resist the spirit of the age - it's also career suicide. We had our first child my first semester of my PhD program, which was simultaneously the most foolish and wisest decision we ever made. It didn't just transform how we saw the world, but it also ripped away the veneer of so much what we had taken for granted. Listening to a child's needs is an incredible way of transforming how you attend to the world. And that doesn't just mean being attuned, connected, and responsive, but fostering ritual, rhythm and rules, as Kim Payne explains.
Ultimately we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world. — Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life
‘Only once we imagined the world as dead could we dedicate ourselves to making it so.’ - Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time
‘Dealing with the planetary crisis is a matter of unlearning’ - Amitav Ghosh
‘These are urgent times, so slow down’ - Bayo Akomalafe
‘Water, when it is still, reflects back even your eyebrows and beard. It is perfectly level and from this the carpenter takes his level. If water stilled offers such clarity, imagine what pure spirit offers!’ - Chuang Tzu
"Never fear the future. You will meet it, if you must, with the same weapons of reason that guard you today against the present."
"Reject your sense of injury, and the injury itself disappears."
[And a longer one, which I say to myself at funerals:]
"Man you have have been a citizen in this great state: what does it matter whether for a few years more or less? For that which is demanded by the law, is demanded of every person. Where is the injustice then when you are sent away, not by a tyrant or a corrupt judge, but by the same nature which brought you into the world?
It is as if an official has dismissed an actor from the stage. You say "I have not yet finished the five acts; but only three of them." Well said; but for some people three acts are the entire drama. What shall be a complete drama is determined by he who caused its creation, and who now causes it to be dissolved. You are the cause of neither. Depart then satisfied; as He who releases you is also satisfied."
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” - Viktor Frankl
“That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah, and the rest is commentary. Now go and study.” - Hillel the Elder
Love this one Sarah. It is similar to one of my favourites: "Nothing is more symptomatic of rural decay than the cleavage in every direction between beauty and utility." - H.J. Massingham.
A fragment may be beautiful, but it needs to serve a purpose - to be woven or patched or knit into a bigger and greater quilt, tapestry, blanket (chose your craft) thus gaining utility. Otherwise it remains merely picturesque but in effect useless (as in lacking a use - its beauty still remains valuable).
"Like so much of Weil’s writing, the line is provocative. It cries out for qualifications, but none are forthcoming. I find the line haunting. It yields a dark but hopeful, salubrious energy."
A comment unrelated to the actual content of what you've shared: I find it striking that people give famous authors much more latitude than regular folk. If Sally Sue, Substacker from Anywhere, USA, had shared Weil's thought with the same lack of qualification, it would either wind up buried (it's grasping after hyperbole that feels tiresome), or firmly rebuffed and then forgotten. I look around and wonder, Is it just me? This seems like bad writing (or thinking) to me. This happens in academic writing all the time too. Things a well-known professor publishes would never make it through peer review for a no-name junior faculty.
But because it's written by *Simone Weil*, the words are imbued with an essence that now elevate it to the level of an amulet. Maybe I lack the charity or wisdom to unlock words like these. Maybe the context would help me handle this amulet. Maybe I'm required to psychologize the statement once I've learned about Weil's life and her historical context (an act of charitable reading we usually don't extend to contemporary, lesser known writers).
I admit, because of someone's name, I'll give their writing more of a chance than if it were written by someone else. "Everyone's talking about X. Surely there's something there..." I feel this way, for example, about Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. I'm sure amazing insights are buried within, but buried they are underneath layers of impenetrable academic jargon and circuitous, frankly bad writing. Clarity was not at the top of his list as he was writing. But again, maybe I lack the eyes to see and read well.
“Everything not saved will be lost” Nintendo
This pretty much encapsulates my recent meditation on human intelligence being finite, despite our capitalist-accumulation-inspired beliefs in socially progressive wisdom and standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants.
That intellectual progress is merely a rearrangement of the furniture, a making space for new things by forgetting much of the old. We are still dumbfounded at how ancient Egyptians created the pyramids, resorting to theories about aliens, merely because we cannot resolve the cognitive dissonance in the lineage between ancient and modern Egyptians.
Love the idea of amulets of pearls Mr. Sacasas. I keep a book full of quotes and wisdom (amulets or pearls) that I refer back to from time to time. "Gleanings from my reading" to use a more agricultural term.
Here are a few for the Agrarian minded among us:
"If we want to save the land, we must save the people who belong to the land. If we want to save the people, we must save the land the people belong to." - Wendell Berry.
"I really only want to say that we may love a place and still be a danger to it." - Wallace Stegner.
"Nothing is more symptomatic of rural decay than the cleavage in every direction between beauty and utility." - H.J. Massingham.
"The real test of the qualities of a smallholder arrises during a depression." - C.H. Gardiner
"To be healthy is literally to be whole; to heal is to make whole." - Wendell Berry
"Not blind opposition to progress, but position to blind progress" - Jon Muir
"Not necessary revival of old practices, but of old values." - Anon (comment at a recent localist book festival).
I have many more of these. People can message or email me if they want some more.
There is another one by Wendell Berry, unsure of exact words at the moment- No man is provincial, who is truly connected to his land.
I love this from President Abraham Lincoln: “The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty.”
I recite this frequently to remind people that terms like “freedom” and “liberty” are meaningless in the absence of context.
Loved this. Just like Accountability and Free Will.
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” - Yeats
“Sometimes, a hypocrite is nothing more than a man who is in the process of changing.” - Brandon Sanderson
“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.” - David Graeber
“Imagine others complexly.” - John Green. Although I hear the phrase most often these days from YouTube Dungeon Master Matthew Colville, who is quoting John.
While not known as a great thinker, I think Mike Tyson's metaphor is prescient: "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face".
"Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for such is the kingdom of God." - Jesus Christ
I can think of no better principle to resist the spirit of the age - it's also career suicide. We had our first child my first semester of my PhD program, which was simultaneously the most foolish and wisest decision we ever made. It didn't just transform how we saw the world, but it also ripped away the veneer of so much what we had taken for granted. Listening to a child's needs is an incredible way of transforming how you attend to the world. And that doesn't just mean being attuned, connected, and responsive, but fostering ritual, rhythm and rules, as Kim Payne explains.
Ultimately we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world. — Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life
Thank you for sharing Etty Hillesum’s life-giving words. Such vision!
Here's one I always return to in moments of grief or regret, it's strangely comforting.
"I chose, and my world was shaken
So what?
The choice may have been mistaken,
The choosing was not
You have to move on"
-- Stephen Sondheim, Move On, from Sunday in the Park with George
'There is no wealth but life', John Ruskin.
‘Only once we imagined the world as dead could we dedicate ourselves to making it so.’ - Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time
‘Dealing with the planetary crisis is a matter of unlearning’ - Amitav Ghosh
‘These are urgent times, so slow down’ - Bayo Akomalafe
‘Water, when it is still, reflects back even your eyebrows and beard. It is perfectly level and from this the carpenter takes his level. If water stilled offers such clarity, imagine what pure spirit offers!’ - Chuang Tzu
‘The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been.’
-T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
For me it's always Marcus Aurelius:
"Never fear the future. You will meet it, if you must, with the same weapons of reason that guard you today against the present."
"Reject your sense of injury, and the injury itself disappears."
[And a longer one, which I say to myself at funerals:]
"Man you have have been a citizen in this great state: what does it matter whether for a few years more or less? For that which is demanded by the law, is demanded of every person. Where is the injustice then when you are sent away, not by a tyrant or a corrupt judge, but by the same nature which brought you into the world?
It is as if an official has dismissed an actor from the stage. You say "I have not yet finished the five acts; but only three of them." Well said; but for some people three acts are the entire drama. What shall be a complete drama is determined by he who caused its creation, and who now causes it to be dissolved. You are the cause of neither. Depart then satisfied; as He who releases you is also satisfied."
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” - Viktor Frankl
“That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah, and the rest is commentary. Now go and study.” - Hillel the Elder
https://substack.com/@scatteredscholar/note/c-77650018
These mountains you are carrying, you were only supposed to climb
Najwa Zebian, in case anyone else wonders.
“What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?”
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
“These fragments have I shored against my ruins” —TS Eliot
Love this one Sarah. It is similar to one of my favourites: "Nothing is more symptomatic of rural decay than the cleavage in every direction between beauty and utility." - H.J. Massingham.
A fragment may be beautiful, but it needs to serve a purpose - to be woven or patched or knit into a bigger and greater quilt, tapestry, blanket (chose your craft) thus gaining utility. Otherwise it remains merely picturesque but in effect useless (as in lacking a use - its beauty still remains valuable).
"Like so much of Weil’s writing, the line is provocative. It cries out for qualifications, but none are forthcoming. I find the line haunting. It yields a dark but hopeful, salubrious energy."
A comment unrelated to the actual content of what you've shared: I find it striking that people give famous authors much more latitude than regular folk. If Sally Sue, Substacker from Anywhere, USA, had shared Weil's thought with the same lack of qualification, it would either wind up buried (it's grasping after hyperbole that feels tiresome), or firmly rebuffed and then forgotten. I look around and wonder, Is it just me? This seems like bad writing (or thinking) to me. This happens in academic writing all the time too. Things a well-known professor publishes would never make it through peer review for a no-name junior faculty.
But because it's written by *Simone Weil*, the words are imbued with an essence that now elevate it to the level of an amulet. Maybe I lack the charity or wisdom to unlock words like these. Maybe the context would help me handle this amulet. Maybe I'm required to psychologize the statement once I've learned about Weil's life and her historical context (an act of charitable reading we usually don't extend to contemporary, lesser known writers).
I admit, because of someone's name, I'll give their writing more of a chance than if it were written by someone else. "Everyone's talking about X. Surely there's something there..." I feel this way, for example, about Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. I'm sure amazing insights are buried within, but buried they are underneath layers of impenetrable academic jargon and circuitous, frankly bad writing. Clarity was not at the top of his list as he was writing. But again, maybe I lack the eyes to see and read well.
"technology: the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."
-max frisch