“I encourage myself, since nobody else encourages me,”
– Werner Herzog
But how?
On every page lives a gem.
Cronin, Paul. Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Faber & Faber, 2020. p. xxiv
Category: Thinkers
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‘All rising to great place is by a winding stair’
Oliver, Henry. Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. United Kingdom, John Murray Press, 2024. p.1
and
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It is interesting to learn once more how much further one can go on one’s second wind. I think that it is an important lesson for everyone to learn for it should also be applied to one’s mental efforts. Most people go through life without discovering the existence of that whole field of endeavor which we describe as a second wind. Whether mentally or physically most people give up at the first appearance of exhaustion. Thus they never learn the glory and the exhilaration of genuine effort…
– Agnes Meyer
Agnes Meyer was Mrs. Graham’s mother. Mrs. Graham the former CEO of the Washington Post.
This was the valuable lesson Agnes instilled.
Oliver, Henry. Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. United Kingdom, John Murray Press, 2024. p.3
and
Graham, Personal History, p. 40.
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People are always speculating – why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth, must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.
– Malcolm X
X, Malcolm. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2015.
and
Oliver, Henry. Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. United Kingdom, John Murray Press, 2024. pg V
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What he does best is fantasy — fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic. And this, in my opinion, he does better than any man. The critical problem with which we are confronted is whether this art — the art of myth-making — is a species of the literary art. The objection to so classifying it is that the Myth does not essentially exist in words at all.
– C.S. Lewis
From the beginning intellectuals were trying to figure out where to classify fantasy and myth. Is myth-making a literary species?
MacDonald, George. George MacDonald. United Kingdom, HarperCollins, 1946.
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It’s no coincidence that the world’s best writers tend to keep diaries. If you faithfully record your life in a journal, you’re writing everyday — and if you write every day, you become a better writer. David Sedaris has kept a diary for forty years. This means that if you’ve kept a diary for a year of your life or less, Sedaris is at least forty times better at writing than you are.
Prefaces and dust jacket copy are underrated.
Sedaris, David. Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002). United States, Little, Brown, 2017.
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There is no Iowa Reference Writers’ Workshop.
The Daniel M. Rothschild bangers continue…
Daniel M. Rothschild. “In Praise of Reference Books.” Discourse Magazine, August 30, 2024. https://www.discoursemagazine.com/p/in-praise-of-reference-books.
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Pish! and Feh! say the reference books. Pick us up as you will and read as much or as little as you choose. Sit in a library and leaf through our pages. Look up a quick item. There are even reference books published specifically for when you’re indisposed, as they say.
Pish! and Feh! – One of my favorite sentence I’ve read all year.
Daniel M. Rothschild. “In Praise of Reference Books.” Discourse Magazine, August 30, 2024. https://www.discoursemagazine.com/p/in-praise-of-reference-books.
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The person who worships God and Zeus—out of agnosticism—wants to split the difference. But you cannot split the difference between a life devoted to service and a life devoted to the deification of one’s own ego. Rashi shows us that the abstraction of only God is God can become tangible in our relationship to tradition. Through the observance of the Torah, study of the words of sages, prayer, sacrifice, and selfless deeds, we have a way of making God concrete. It’s not the concretion of an icon, but the realization that we ourselves are the conduit through which God becomes palpable. To put it in Buberian terms, there are times when we can serve to channel God for others, and times when others can serve to channel God for us. Often its hard to tell which is which. Is our hearkening to the prophet, the prophet channeling God, or us enabling the prophet to channel God through the gift of our awareness and deep listening?
– Zohar Atkins
Applies beyond faith.
Atkins, Zohar. Don’t Split the Difference. August 30, 2024. https://etzhasadeh.substack.com/p/dont-split-the-difference.
Floodlights and Goalposts 