thakate:

apoplecticskeptic:

It’s Sunday, so this is kinda like church, right? Here’s my sermon for the morning.

[previously]

My husband rocks. 

Weekend Reading

This week's Weekend Reading contains some absolute gems- so without further ado, here are the articles worthy of your attention this weekend:

• In Defence of Obscure Words is an argument by Will Self for using words that often need to be accompanied by a dictionary, warning against the dangers of intellectual laziness. I couldn't agree more.


• Sherry Turkle begs us to put the social media revolution in perspective. Giving her own mother as an example, Turkle worries that "like a lot of older people today, she fritters away her social time with whoever she runs into, instead of sustaining continued conversations with the people she cares about the most."


• David Eagleman is a new breed of man: a rock star neuroscientist. In The Brain: a User's Guide, Eagleman puts the accomplishments of nearly everyone on the planet to shame with such feats as attaching an electrical grid to a blind man's tongue in order to allow him to "see" as he climbs Mount Everest. Neuroscience rocks.


• Speaking of neuroscience: I've long said that if I could travel to any place in time, I would choose Renaissance-era Florence for its unparalleled concentration of genius. Eric Kandel has changed my mind, explaining that 1900 Vienna contributed as much to human knowledge, but did so through a lens of reason. He also makes an eloquent case for an intersection of neuroscience and the arts in The Age of Insight.


• Over on Brain Pickings, a summary of Clay Johnson's fantastic book The Information Diet: a Case for Conscious Consumption, in which Johnson explains why "arguing that blaming the abundance of information itself is as absurd as blaming the abundance of food for obesity."


• I've saved my favorite for last: if you're half the fan of Russian literature that I am, this comparison of Dolstoyevsky and Tolstoy by eight preeminent modern scholars will thrill and delight you.

On Suspense

Every morning with breakfast, I sit down to watch The Daily Show, reveling in its ability to update me on the world’s happenings while at the same time eliciting the laughter so critical to beginning a new day. Yesterday, I sat down with my unassuming bowl of raisin bran and turned on the DVR. The recording had caught the end of It’s Always Sunny, so I quickly hit the fast-forward button.

On a DirecTV DVR, if you fast-forward, when you finally hit the “play” button, the recording skips back a few seconds, assuming that your fingers did not respond to your brain’s command as quickly as is necessary. So, when I finally hit the play button, Jon Stewart was saddled up to his familiar desk, beginning his opening statements. Since the recording had gone back a few seconds, though, what I saw actually began with the title sequence- that familiar booming voice announcing ceremoniously that “This is the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”

I noticed a strange relief come over me when I saw that the recording had skipped back to the title sequence. I wondered why. I’d seen this sequence, literally, hundreds of times. Why did I attach any importance to it?

Instantly, the words of Alfred Hitchcock came to mind:

There is no thrill in the bang... only in the anticipation of it.

It was the anticipation- or, more accurately, the suspense that the title sequence built that subtly and silently thrilled me.

This appreciation for suspense is one of life’s great joys, and one that largely goes unnoticed.

There are epic moments in all of our lives. Indeed, we seem to hopelessly attempt to model our lives after Hollywood scripts, simply attempting to fill the space between those epic moments.

Maybe you’re writing a novel, the completion of which is your next epic moment. Maybe you’re a mother, and wait impatiently for those all-too-rare moments in which your child takes her first steps, or makes you so proud that you feel that you might burst. Maybe you’re working eighty hours a week in hopes of finally making partner at your firm. Maybe, if you judge your life to be woefully lacking in epic moments, you turn on the TV or go to the movies to witness others' epic moments.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

~ Samuel Johnson

Looking at life through the lens of the epic inevitably yields many blind spots, but it is those who master the art of peripheral vision who are truly life’s conquerors. In that peripheral vision lies suspense, anticipation, and life itself.

If you've prepared a cup of tea, take a moment to savor the aroma, the warmth, before you take that first sip. If you're about to delve into War and Peace, take a breath and simply acknowledge the weight of it in your hands. If you’re writing a novel, develop the awareness to appreciate the time spent in front of the blank page, of honing your craft. If you’re a mother, learn to see the mind of your child churning, radiating in every direction as she begins to grasp the concepts that will eventually lead to the stellar report card. If you’re a lawyer, or an advertiser, or a barista, or a civil worker, take off the glasses and let the blind spots reveal themselves to you. It is there that life resides, and it is only when the fog lifts that you can begin to savor the anticipation of it.

An intense anticipation itself transforms possibility into reality; our desires being often but precursors of the things which we are capable of performing.

~Samuel Smiles

We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is true. If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely. If we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will know only how to be lonely.

The Flight From Conversation

Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete?

delirium-of-disorder:

It is hard to know how our future descendants will regard the little sliver of history that we live in. It is hard to know what events will seem important to them, what the narrative of now will look like to the twenty-fifth century mind. We tend to think of our time as one uniquely shaped by the advance of technology, but more and more I suspect that this will be remembered as an age of cosmology—-as the moment when the human mind first internalized the cosmos that gave rise to it.

Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete?

Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves – slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment.

Thich Nhat Hanh