“Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.”
– Abigail Adams
Abigail quoting a line from a Daniel Defoe poem as a reminder to John of men’s natures.
She gets me.
McCullough, David. John Adams. Simon & Schuster, 2001. pg 102
Category: ideas
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I seem to have lost my ability to focus and force my way back into a novel. So today I introduced a period of martial law. Never leaving my desk, writing a set amount during a set period of time, all the familiar methods I used to fall back on. There is great satisfaction to be had from looking at the empty page, at your notes, at what you’ve already done, then will yourself, almost force yourself, to write some more, and finding that it actually works. It means I am still able to use my imagination to escape from this world into the imagined world of my novel.
Sheer will. Sometimes it takes sheer will and martial law to type one page.
Pamuk, Orhan. Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022. United States, Knopf Canada, 2024. pg 162
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The great poems, plays, novels, and stories teach us how to go on living, even when submerged under forty fathoms of bother and distress. If you live ninety years you will be a battered survivor. Your own mistakes, accidents, and failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.
– Harold Bloom
Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.
Book preludes are underrated.
12 pages in and this book strikes like a thunderbolt.
Bloom, Harold. Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader’s Mind over a Universe of Death. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. pg 13
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Tend to the small things.
More people are defeated by blisters
than by mountains.
– Kevin Kelly
A fun exercise to do with this book is to summarize, or tag, each quote with one word. I tagged this one “Details”
Kelly, Kevin. Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. New York: Viking, 2023. pg 26
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I have attempted, in my own life and in this book, to reconcile a love of nature with an affection for machines. In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines.
As read from George Dyson’s AI history book – Darwin among the Machines.
Prefaces are underrated.
Dyson, George. Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence. United States: Basic Books, 2012. pgix
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He meticulously cultivated new ideas and distilled them into words. “He walked much and contemplated,” wrote his contemporary John Aubrey. “and he had in the head of his Staffe a pen and inke-horn, carried always a Note-book in his pocket, and as soon as a notion darted, he presently entered it into his Booke, or else he should perhaps have lost it.
As read from George Dyson’s all-to-relevant book on modern times, but was published in 1997 – Darwin among the Machines.
Love a good notebook story. Don’t you?
Dyson, George. Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence. United States: Basic Books, 2012. pg5
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Underlying his meticulous craftsmanship and insatiable curiosity was a complete lack of patience for sloppy work, easy solutions, or glib answers. He refused to be satisfied with the ordinary. The young man who would later talk of the “Intergalactic Computer Network” and publish professional papers with titles like “The System System” and “The Gridless, Wireless Rat-Shocker” possessed a mind that was constantly probing, and constantly at play.
Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider named it right the first time. We need to get back to calling the internet the Intergalactic Computer Network immediately.
Like right now.
Filibuster it and get it done.
Waldrop, M. Mitchell. The Dream Machine. United States: Stripe Matter Incorporated, 2018. pg25,26
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“You are not singular in your suspicions that you know but little,” he had told Caroline, in response to her quandary over the riddles of life. “The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know….Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough….So questions and so answers your affectionate grandfather.”
John Adams became more philosophical as he aged. Do we all?
McCullough, David. John Adams. Simon & Schuster, 2001.
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“Griefs upon griefs! Disappointments upon disappointments. What then? This is a gay, merry world notwithstanding.”
– John Adams
The final John Adam’s quote in McCullough’s brilliant biography. A quote written in a letter to his friend Francis van der Kemp.
McCullough, David. John Adams. Simon & Schuster, 2001. pg 651
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If, as I maintain, a prime reason why we should read is to strengthen the self, then both Whitman and Dickinson are essential poets.
-Harold Bloom
Floodlights and Goalposts 