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.
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.
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.
"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.
‘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
I use index cards as bookmarks and copy down sentences that capture my attention, and this post prompted me to look through the pile - for which, thank you. Most of the quotes still hold their freshness for me but may not hold any for other people: I found that even though the quotes stood alone well enough, my appreciation still relied on the context of where I read it, each quote bringing back something of the memory of reading the original work. For this reason they might not qualify as 'amulets' per se, but I think they serve a similar purpose for me. In the knowledge that I can trust the words in this pile of cards to speak to me, it feels like having a sort of sacred text at home, which is a nice thing for an atheist such as myself.
Anyway, one of the quotes below, from The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick. I have given the book away so can't check, but I think the context is something like Gornick having held a door open for an old man carrying heavy bags:
'This man realised that I had not been inordinately helpful; and he need not be inordinately thankful. He was recalling for both of us the ordinary recognition that every person in trouble has a right to expect, and every witness an obligation to extend.'
I often think about the quality of the media I'm consuming. For this purpose, the most resonant phrase I've found is from the programming/data processing world: "Garbage In = Garbage Out".
“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 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.
“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.
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.
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
"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.
'There is no wealth but life', John Ruskin.
"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
‘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
From the end of Berry’s poem “The Wish To Be Generous”…….’my life a patient willing descent into the grass’
I use index cards as bookmarks and copy down sentences that capture my attention, and this post prompted me to look through the pile - for which, thank you. Most of the quotes still hold their freshness for me but may not hold any for other people: I found that even though the quotes stood alone well enough, my appreciation still relied on the context of where I read it, each quote bringing back something of the memory of reading the original work. For this reason they might not qualify as 'amulets' per se, but I think they serve a similar purpose for me. In the knowledge that I can trust the words in this pile of cards to speak to me, it feels like having a sort of sacred text at home, which is a nice thing for an atheist such as myself.
Anyway, one of the quotes below, from The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick. I have given the book away so can't check, but I think the context is something like Gornick having held a door open for an old man carrying heavy bags:
'This man realised that I had not been inordinately helpful; and he need not be inordinately thankful. He was recalling for both of us the ordinary recognition that every person in trouble has a right to expect, and every witness an obligation to extend.'
"You can't get used to the stars, no matter how long you live here." Jennifer Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad )
I often think about the quality of the media I'm consuming. For this purpose, the most resonant phrase I've found is from the programming/data processing world: "Garbage In = Garbage Out".
"This, too, will pass."
written on an wall in a jail cell. It helps against despair - and informs, that the happy days will also end.
Often repeated by my Grandma Martha and Great-Aunt Margaret. Truth in those words!
“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