Blank pages beg to be filled, and it helps to have them around.
– Seth Godin
Keep blank pages around, but don’t keep them blank forever.
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There I think the attitude of Epictetus helps guide one to the right reaction. He thought every mischance in life, however bad, created an opportunity to learn something useful, and one’s duty was not to become immersed in self-pity but to utilize each terrible blow in a constructive fashion.
– Charlie MungerMunger, Charles T.. Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. N.p., Stripe Matter Incorporated. pp279
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You won’t be surprised given my proclivity to sailing, and poetry, and the occasional pipe, that it’s Ratty, is the figure with whom I identify most strongly. Although there’s a bit of Moley in me as well, I think.
– Malcolm GuiteSometimes the algorithm is correct. Malcolm Guite on YouTube might be the find of the year.
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This is Bruce fuckin’ Springsteen saying that he was not a natural genius and he would have to work hard. And let me tell you something right here: no one is a natural genius. We have talents to a lesser or greater degree, but it is a waste unless we work hard at the small things.
When Virat Kohli first started batting in the nets, well before he had started shaving, he had to focus on the small things to get better. Sure, he probably got there with great hand-eye coordination, but now he had to cultivate all the good habits that have to be reflexive in a great batsman. He had to work on his footwork, the angle of the elbow while moving into a drive, the movement of the shoulder into the line, the balance of the body, the stillness of the head. And only after hours and days and weeks and months and years of consicious practice could some of those become internalised to the point that an onlooker could say, ‘Genius!’
Genius?
Maybe not for all of us. But excellence, certainly, is achievable by working hard on the small things.
More encouraging words from Amit Varma’s India Uncut Newsletter.
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The patron saint of overworked teachers, Alice Kober, taught five classes at a time at Brooklyn College in the 1940s. At any rate, she taught during the day. At night, she set about deciphering an ancient language, Linear B, that had been uncovered on clay tablets at the turn of the century and that stood as a Mount Everest for linguists, a seemingly impossible puzzle. A middle aged spinster, the daughter of working class immigrants, she collected the statistics for each sign of the dead language onto two hundred thousand paper slips. Because of paper shortages during and after the war these slips had to be repurposed from any spare paper she could find. The slips in turn were collected into old cigarette cartons. Her work was cut off by an untimely illness, but she laid the foundation for the dramatic decipherement that took place only a few years after her death.
One never knows when their work will bear fruit. Keep going.
Hitz, Zena. Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. United States, Princeton University Press, 2021. (pp 41)
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We promise “till death do us part” when our love is young and good-looking and when life is full of promise, but it is in failure or decrepitude or at the hospital bed that we learn what we meant and why.
Zena HitzZena dropping truth right from the introduction.
Hitz, Zena. Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. United States, Princeton University Press, 2021.
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All was a-shake and a-shiver – glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.
Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. United Kingdom, Welbeck Editions, 2021. pp11
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A reader beginning a poem is like someone stepping into a rowboat with a stranger at the oars; the first few draws on the long oars through the deep water tell a lot — is one safe, or is one apt to be soon drowned?
– Mary OliverA simile to help one recognize a “good” poem.
A Poetry Handbook might be the modern Rhymester
Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook. Taiwan, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994. pp56-57
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I write by hand, and handwriting is drawing, the hand moves and leaves ink traces on the paper – – isn’t that drawing?
– Mary RuefleAustin Kleon interviewed Mary Ruefle via type-writer and postal service.
Read the entire, brilliant, interview here.
Floodlights and Goalposts 