The Shirky Principle

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

     Kevin Kelly, quoting Clay Shirky in an article in The Technium

 

 

 

 

Imagination

Love alone is not enough.
Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom.
Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving
but because we first stopped imagining.

        James Hillman, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life

 

 

 

 

Wrong way

Of course I doubt [the existence of God], I would distrust anybody who didn't doubt. But I'm a believer. I have an understanding and belief in the divinity of things. It seems to me that people look at God in the wrong way. They think that God is there to serve them, but it's the other way around. God isn't some kind of cosmic bell-boy to be called upon to sort things out for us. It's important for us to realise that God has given us the potential to sort things out on our own. 

        Nick Cave, Observer interview 1998

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

                        Muriel Rukeyser

 

 

 

 

 

              

No good reason

It's an amazing thing to think that ours is the first generation in history that really can end extreme poverty, the kind that means a child dies for lack of food in its belly. That should be seen as the most incredible, historic opportunity but instead it's become a millstone around our necks. We let our own pathetic excuses about how it's "difficult" justify our own inaction. Be honest. We have the science, the technology, and the wealth. What we don't have is the will, and that's not a reason that history will accept.

Bono, 2004 interview, World Association of Newspapers for World Press Freedom Day

 

 

 

 

Games

God may not play dice but he enjoys a good round
    of Trivial Pursuit every now and again.

            Federico Fellini, I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon

 

 

 

 

 

Ancestors

You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor.
A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways.
But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions,
that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes.

                Richard Powers, The Overstory

 

 

 

 

 

Understanding

You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.

Rebecca Herold, Managing an Information Security and Privacy Awareness Training Program  

 

 

 

 

 

Bastille Day

An enormous fortress of prejudices, privileges, superstitions,
lies, exactions, abuses, violences, iniquities, and darkness
still stands erect in this world,
with its towers of hatred.
It must be cast down.
This monstrous mass must be made to crumble.
To conquer at Austerlitz is grand;
to take the Bastille is immense.

        Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

 

 

 

 

 

Everyday spirituality

Elders serve as conduits between the divine realm and the mundane world,
making the abstract truths of spirituality accessible to the community
by embodying them in their everyday behavior.

        Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, From Age-Ing to Sage-Ing

 

 

 

 

Poem: The breeze at dawn

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
Where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

      Rumi  

Change

Not everything that is faced can be changed.
But nothing can be changed until it is faced. …
Most of us are about as eager to change as we were to be born,
and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

         James Baldwin, As Much Truth As One Can Bear

 

 

 

 

 

What is wanted

The teachers are everywhere.
What is wanted is a learner.

        Anne Lamott, What Are People For?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Explanation after the fact

The anthropologists are busy, indeed,
and ready to transport us back into the savage forest,
where all human things...have their beginnings;
but the seed never explains the flower.

            Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way

 

 

 

 

 

Beauty

The beauty ain’t in the necklace.

        It’s in the neck.

             Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History blog, 28 rude notes on writing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What to do

What should young people do with their lives today?
Many things, obviously.
But the most daring thing is to create stable communities
in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

    Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday "Thoughts of a Free Thinker"

 

 

 

What is sacred?

Pagans exalt sacred things,
        the Prophets extol sacred deeds.

                    Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Earth Is The Lord's 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Answer July

Answer July—
Where is the Bee—
Where is the Blush—
Where is the Hay?

Ah, said July—
Where is the Seed—
Where is the Bud—
Where is the May—
Answer Thee—Me—

Nay—said the May—
Show me the Snow—
Show me the Bells—
Show me the Jay!

Quibbled the Jay—
Where be the Maize—
Where be the Haze—
Where be the Bur?
Here—said the Year—

            Emily Dickinson

 

 

 

 

 

Independence Day

The flames kindled on the 4th of July 1776,
have spread over too much of the globe
to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism;
on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.

Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Adams, 1821

The American Dream

There are those, I know, who will reply that the liberation of humanity,
        the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream.
                They are right. It is. It is the American Dream.

                                 Archibald MacLeish, Life magazine 1960 

 

 

 

Three wishes

Have a heart that never hardens,
    and a temper that never tires,
        and a touch that never hurts.

                Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Big mistake

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery,
a metaphor for a proof,
a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths,
and oneself for an oracle,
is inborn in us.

        Paul Valery, The Method of Leonardo da Vinci 

Rhyme and reason

It has been said that history repeats itself. T
his is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.

    Theodor Reik, The Unreachables

 

 

 

 

 

Measuring wonder

I was barked at by numerous dogs who are earning their food guarding ignorance and superstition for the benefit of those who profit from it. Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source. They are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against the traditional "opium for the people"—cannot bear the music of the spheres. The Wonder of nature does not become smaller because one cannot measure it by the standards of human moral and human aims.

Albert Einstein, Letter discussing responses to his essay "Science and Religion" 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Parting words

Remember, I’ll never leave you,
she said, as she got in the car to go to the airport.
And however ridiculous it sounded,
you knew it was true --
as true as anything is in this life.
She wasn’t going anywhere.
A truth-teller in a world of illusion
steady in her course.

 

 

 

 

There will be dancing

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.

I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business.

[This incident was the source of a statement commonly attributed to Goldman that occurs in several variants:

If I can't dance, it's not my revolution!
If I can't dance, I don't want your revolution!
If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.
A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.
If there won't be dancing at the revolution, I'm not coming.]

Emma Goldman, Living My Life

 

 

 

 

Worried?

Worrying is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions.
It is time to acknowledge this, perhaps even to learn to do it better.

        Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail

 

 

 

 

Public learning

Life is like playing a violin solo in public
    and learning the instrument as one goes on.

             Samuel Butler, 1895 speech at the Somerville Club

 

 

 

 

 

 

Make of it what you will

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric,
but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

        W.B. Yeats, Essays

 

 

 

The way forward

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship,
one must sometimes go forward by going back.

            John Barth, Chimera

 

 

 

Cause and effect

But churches always have been the leading cause of the need for churches.

        David James Duncan, The River Why

 

 

 

 

Poem: Summer Solstice

By the end of the longest day of the year he could not stand it,
he went up the iron stairs through the roof of the building
and over the soft, tarry surface
to the edge, put one leg over the complex green tin cornice
and said if they came a step closer that was it.
Then the huge machinery of the earth began to work for his life,
the cops came in their suits blue-grey as the sky on a cloudy evening,
and one put on a bullet-proof vest, a
black shell around his own life,
life of his children's father, in case
the man was armed, and one, slung with a
rope like the sign of his bounden duty,
came up out of a hole in the top of the neighboring building
like the gold hole they say is in the top of the head,
and began to lurk toward the man who wanted to die.
The tallest cop approached him directly,
softly, slowly, talking to him, talking, talking,
while the man's leg hung over the lip of the next world
and the crowd gathered in the street, silent, and the
hairy net with its implacable grid was
unfolded near the curb and spread out and
stretched as the sheet is prepared to receive a birth.
Then they all came a little closer
where he squatted next to his death, his shirt
glowing its milky glow like something
growing in a dish at night in the dark in a lab and then
everything stopped
as his body jerked and he
stepped down from the parapet and went toward them
and they closed on him, I thought they were going to
beat him up, as a mother whose child has been
lost will scream at the child when it’s found, they
took him by the arms and held him up and
leaned him against the wall of the chimney and the
tall cop lit a cigarette
in his own mouth, and gave it to him, and
then they all lit cigarettes, and the
red, glowing ends burned like the
tiny campfires we lit at night
back at the beginning of the world.

Sharon Olds

 

 

 

 

 

More practice

Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

Be somebody

Don't terrorize.
Organize.
Don't burn.
Give kids a chance to learn …
The real answer to race problems in this country is education.
Not burning and killing.
Be ready.
Be qualified.
Own something.
Be somebody.
That's Black Power.

    James Brown, Statement after the assassination of Martin Luther King

Practice

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once,
but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

        Bruce Lee, American Legends: The Life of Bruce Lee

 

 

 

 

Ready or not

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.
Life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life,
is so breathtakingly serious!

        Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

 

 

 

 

Play your part

I think out of the dreary sameness of existence,
a measure of dramatic life may be drawn.
Even the most commonplace,
the deadest among the living,
may play a part in a great drama.

From a January 1900 lecture by 17-year-old James Joyce
to the Literary and Historical Society at University College Dublin.

Eternity

Stars and blossoming fruit-trees:
    utter permanence and extreme fragility
        give an equal sense of eternity.

                Simone Weil, Chance

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: My Father Swearing

Bitch, he’d say, always, when he could not work the wood his way,
bitch, as if there were a goddess of all his troubles, grinning,
a woman at the wellspring who skewed the nail, split the joist,
drove his hefted hopes deep into the ground,
bitch, his woe, his wound, his eldest curse.

And we would gather, hidden, my brothers and I,
huddled like shepherds by the door to the shed
to hearken to the litany surely to follow, the dam that would burst,
his power and rage, hammer and tongue.

Bastard then, predictably, and a marriage was made,
like an Adam come lately to a paradise of swearing,
the bitch and the bastard driven out of the garden
to bedevil him further, to beat the bejesus,
like a two-headed god, both mouths washed out with soap,
come to witness, come to share in the blame.

Then son of a bitch, and it all became clear,
a family, procreation, the Gilgamesh epic,
a new generation gathered against him,
and we were the children and he was the father
as he battered the wood, the precision gone out,
gone into the word, the word become flesh.

Then, always, incarnate, the rhythm established,
a flurry, a billingsgate of bitch of a bitch,
and bitch of a bastard, and son of a bitch of a bitch
of a bastard. There structure was born,
prepositional phrases, like blue Chinese lanterns hung out
beneath the moon, this swearing to God, this awful begatting.

We broke at that point, skedaddled, running off to the lilacs,
covering our mouths for fear we’d be heard,
to say in that darkness what was forbidden in the light,
a language mixed with laughter lifting up between the trees,
a forefathers’ song, the words that made the world.

                John Hogden

 

 

 

 

 

Time marches on

There was a man they released [from prison on a wrongful conviction] after forty years, one rolled out in a wheelchair. He said on the news, "I can't think about the lost time because guess what, time doesn't work backwards anyway. I got what's in front of me, same as you." 

         Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions for You

 

 

 

 

Nothing happens until something moves

Remember, motions are the precursors of emotions.
You can’t control the latter directly
but only through your choice of motions or actions.

        George Crane, Psychology Applied

 

 

 

 

How do we do it?

I am more and more convinced
that our happiness or our unhappiness
depends far more on the way we meet the events of life
than on the nature of those events themselves.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, in Lightning Fast Enlightenment

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hopeless

The main thing you need to know about instructions
is that no one is going to read them—
at least not until after repeated attempts
at “muddling through” have failed.”

        Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think, Revisited

 

 

 

 

Promises

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future,
making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.

        Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Laughter

He told me a joke.
And seeing him laugh has done more for me
Than any scripture I will ever read.

        Meister Eckhart, in Love Poems from God