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September
September 29 Read Peter Shelton's essays on skiing (and more).
I found him when I stumbled upon the beautiful coffee-table book Ski the Rockies, which has a forward by Steve Cohen and stunning photos by Marc Muench.
September 28 Random memory: The first time someone walked in on me while I was in the bathroom was at the Chateau marina in Brandon, and a young woman peaked into the room while I was seated before apologizing. I was pretty darn embarrassed — probably 8 years old.
Random memory: The first time I rode a dirt bike, with Luke J. on his uncle/aunt's or grandparents' farm, at probably 11 years old, riding fast through the trial that led around their land, and by the pond; also that weekend: running across the top of the hay bales in a row
September 27 The more ambitious thing is not to make more money. It is more ambitious to do what you want. And if you are already doing what you want, concentrate your ambition on making more money.
On the face, fire and ice is a dichotomy. But in fact, both fire and ice are both masculine and feminine. Each is a Duality. Fire is masculine in because advances and expels; it is feminine because it is chaotic and formless and wild and untamable. Ice is feminine because it conceals and withholds and protects; it's masculine because it is rigid and structured and perfectly ordered and impenetrable.
I will not inherit the Earth, and I am okay with that.
September 26 I live in New Jersey, and my car horn doesn't work. There's some thing to write about there, as a metaphor for a practice in passivity/detachment.
A very tricky and common idiom mix-up: "free reign" (as if you were granted the freedom to reign over a kingdom) instead of "free rein," which is correct and has the allusion to horseback-riding.
A verse from the version of Genesis that exists in my head:
Then the eyes of both of them opened, and each seeing the beauty in the other's naked body, the two were moved to make love. Beneath the trees in the center of the garden, God's creatures conceived of twins: the first mortal man and woman, both burdened and liberated by the divine knowledge of good and evil.
September 25 Concrete and asphalt and rubber stand as barriers between man and God, keeping him apart from Nature. God is everywhere, except where we have forbade Her to enter.
One thing I love about working in text is the size of the data. It's so portable. You can download an entire book in seconds, and you can have your entire manuscript in a single Google Doc. But video is so much more cumbersome. And you're working in time (the timeline) rather than in space (on the page) when you edit. My brain doesn't think that way. I'd get totally lost, out of my depth, disoriented.
The essay is a woven form: the best have both a convincing argument and a compelling story (or stories).
Reclassify English verb tenses so that there is a clearer hierarchy and more intuitive classifications. (Ref: this Grammarly article)
One of the best ways to honor individual human agency (especially in a capitalistic society) is to create incentive structures that promote the behavior you want, rather than asking the person for a certain behavior by expecting them to appease and obey you, or by appealing to the "goodness" of their character. For instance, if your employer wants you to work longer or take on more responsibility, they ought to offer you a raise or promise that rewards would be due to you if you preformed well with the new responsibilities. It violates your agency for them to ask significantly more of you, as if you are required to acquiesce, without offering some sort of compensation or benefit in return.
In short, expecting someone to do something you wish when there is no incentive to do so is to be ignorant of their agency and autonomy.
The park ranger explores a place and loves it so and finds it so valuable that he thinks, "Other people need to see this!" And what must he do then? He must make it accessible to others, by blazing a trail to follow from the parking lot to the grand vista at the summit.
Whether you’re writing a one-paragraph anecdote, a lengthy story as part of your essay, or a fictional short story, it will consist of these three elements: Promise, Progress, and Payoff (from one of Brandon Sanderson's plotting lectures):
- You need your reader to have an expectation, for them to be anticipating some change (a Promise).
- Then, you need to move toward that expectation in time, place, and character (Progress).
- Finally, you need to resolve the expectation, either by subverting it or fulfilling it in a surprising and satisfying way (Payoff).
Consider taking Andrew Holecek's course on The Tibetan Book of the Dead whenever I end up reading it.
September 24 A dichotomy that is hard to blend into a duality: Love and Logistics
The way to bring about the Kingdom of Ends is with the Will of Power.
The sheep in Iceland trample and even graze on the 10,000-year-old moss. But you and I alone can understand that organism's toil and labor. We could trample it too, or we could honor and protect it for its dignity.
In Hornstrandir was the first time in my life that I spent a day alone, in any meaningful way. For 48 hours, the only macroscopic organisms I encountered were the bugs that would leap up as I sloshed through the marsh and the few birds that silently soared about the fjord.
The fruition of your ambition requires stillness.
Why is it Tree of Life and The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the center of Eden? It’s because moral wisdom and immortality are the two primary characteristics of God. The only way man differs from God is that he is mortal.
How I would rewrite genesis (from the Creation of Man to Expulsion from Eden — Genesis 2:4 – Genesis 3:24):
- God is both the Mother and the Father (Nature and [Knowledge/Time]).
- The paternal part of God creates Eve, and the maternal part creates Adam.
- God places Adam and Eve in a particularly beautiful part of Earth, within the Garden of Eden, home to the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
- Adam and Eve are born as infants. Adam floats down from the sky and lands comfortably upon the high-up cradle of a large leaf spanning two tree branches. Eve floats up from the depths of a lake and is carried along the surface upon a large leaf. Seeing the two humans are helpless without Them, God comes down and takes the form of two beings, to be the mother and father and rear their creations.
- They build a shelter together and procure fruit from the Tree of Life, each day. Within a day, the two are walking and talking.
- Over a meal one morning, the parents, God, tell their children that they can eat of any tree in the garden except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They ask for their trust that they will avoid that tree until they are older. And they promise to tell them more about the tree when they are ready to be on their own.
- Within a week, Adam and Eve are going off from home to the Tree of Life by themselves, and playing throughout the day with the animals of the garden.
- Soon, God agrees that Their creation is ready to be left to Earth alone. Before returning to Heaven, the mother and father share their knowledge of the world and give their creation a choice: There are two trees in the center of Eden. The Tree of Life will sustain you so that you never die, and you can roam the Earth as you please in perfect harmony with Us and with Nature. Then, there is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. If you eat from it, you will gain Our divine wisdom and become moral agents in the world. But having that knowledge on Earth has the consequence of making you mortal. This effect is irreversible. If you eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Tree of Life will die and will leave Earth for good. With the introduction of death comes also the divine power to create life. Eating from that tree will make you fertile, full of the seed and eggs of life, and you could rear offspring of your own, as we have done for you.
- They emphasize that it the choice is with Adam and Eve, who are owed agency for the fact of their existence: We have created the world and given you this choice so that you can decide your fate, according to whatever you deem your nature to be. Either you are meant to live unencumbered together, in perfect harmony with Nature, or you are meant to have dominion over the earth and the capacity to create offspring of your own. These are the existences available to you. And we will leave the Earth to you. We just ask that you do not forget who you are: the son and daughter of God.
- After millennia of living together and being fascinate with the earth and getting to know each other, Adam and Eve consider eating from the Tree. There are no decisions for them to make, and they have a sense that there is a buried capacity in them that is inaccessible. It's a subtle longing for wisdom, responsibility, and to create offspring.
- And the fruition of their creation is when they decide to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and become mortal. Eve procures a piece of fruit that the two share beneath the tree.
- After eating the fruit, their eyes are opened, and they see the beauty in each other's naked bodies. For the first time in their lives, they are moved to make love. And they conceive twins, the first man and woman born as mortals with the divine knowledge of Good and Evil.
In Eden, pre-Fall, Adam and Eve were incomplete with only the seed of humanity within them, yet unsown. Sin was the fruition of their creation.
September 23 Deduction vs. Induction
Both deductive and inductive arguments reveal what is likely to be true; neither can offer certainty. The difference between them is where the uncertainty lies.
For deduction, it is uncertain whether the premises are true, especially when they are rational rather than empirical. But if all the premises are true (which is impossible to verify for any worthwhile deductive argument), then you know with certainty that the conclusion is true.
For induction, the conclusion is what's uncertain. You build an argument from accepted, demonstrable, empirical truths and use those accepted propositions to propose a conclusion. Induction rests on the faith that the facts you have chosen do in fact indicate the conclusion you predict.
You can see how this plays out in an arguments about black swans (in a time when only white swans had been observed:
Induction
- Humans have observed millions of swans.
- Every single one of the swans observed has been white. Therefore: All swans are white (there are no black swans).
Deduction
- Humans have observed millions of swans.
- Swans have been observed to have a pigment other than white, namely gray
- Grey is the combination of the white and black pigments
- A swan could exhibit a black pigment, either on a single feather or on its entire body Therefore: Black swans may exist.
The problem with induction is to assume that all the swans observed represent all swans. The problem with deduction is the premise that the swan is capable of producing a black pigment.
Intro: What are you writing about, and why does it matter? Thesis: What are you saying about it? Body: How can you say that? Conclusion: What does this mean?
Labor is sacred, because it requires a human's time, attention, effort, and energy. That claim is my justification for the following moral dictum (of omission): Do not make someone else's job any harder for them than it already is.
That means refraining from any action that would create a problem (that you could have prevented or that you could solve yourself) whose solution would require the labor of another person. (The exception here is if you opt to compensate a person for the extra labor you have caused them, as a consolation for being an inconvenience.)
A simple example of an immoral action that violates this negative principle: spitting your gum out onto the floor indoors and leaving it for other people to step on, causing them to fiddle with the goo on the bottom of their shoes, and leaving it for someone else to dispose of when you could have — much more easily — disposed of it yourself.
Parable of the Pack and the Herd (v1)
You could live as part of a herd of sheep in a fenced meadow, led by an omnipresent shepherd. The shepherd is the one who caught you when you fell out of the womb, the one who grooms you, feeds you, and the only being who could possibly kill you. You have no desire to mate, only the urge to graze and only the sense subsist. Any new lambs in the meadow were procured by the shepherd and, as with the entire herd, proclaimed to be your kin. You are free to roam the meadow and graze wherever you like, except for a certain acre between the two streams in the middle of the meadow that harbors fruit unfit for you. Yet, if you keep to the herd and graze where the shepherd permits, you will live forever.
Or, you could live as part of a pack of wolves, deep in the forest, high in the mountains — or wherever you please. The bounds of your home are only inscribed by your ambition. You live among kin you have chosen and pups you rear yourself. You hunt and explore and tussle and howl with them. Your days are filled with variety, difficulty, and always the risk of death. Your only hope for immortality is to leave a lasting impact on your kin, so that they may prosper and endure. You will die, but your spirit may live on, in whatever portion it is expressed in the spirits of your descendants.
In either case, you are inhuman, because you are without sin. You have no self-consciousness and no concept of success, which means you cannot fail. Would you rather live as part of the herd or the pack? Would you rather be a Wolf of the Wilderness or a Lamb of God?
One world is pre-Fall Eden, the other Earth.
Faith is the illusion of security. Insecurity is the illusion that you lack faith.
Joh Muir in his journal, reflecting on the brevity of life after seeing the first soldiers sent off to fight in the Civil War:
"As the leaf on the ripples of the Lake, generation follows generation. We are passing away. How great the need for energy to spend our little while to purpose." – from Son of the Wilderness
Do you have an acquiescing spirit or one autonomous?
September 22 A bird wants to be flying, and it wants to be nesting. It cannot resign to one or the other. If it stays in the nest, it will starve, and if it stays away, in flight, it won't ever bring food home. That is the duality; the bird must do both. All birds must leave the nest, and all flights from the nest must lead the bird back to it.
Vehicles alienate you from time and space. The closest you can get to the present place is by walking. And the faster you go, the more you lose touch with where you are — from two wheels to four to two turbines.
A lot of content — on whatever medium: articles, essays, Tweets, TV shows, films — is just jizz. Some content is actually full of meaning, the offspring of a mind or heart or soul. But you can conceive anything with just ejaculate; you need to pair it with the egg of a valuable idea.
Adventure is acting on ambition, animated by mystery.
Deerfield Academy is a place where one of the most damning schoolyard rumors is that one has an Oedipus Complex.
Ecstasy is more ecstatic when earned than when it is fabricated, purchased, or consumed.
September 21 Assuming it doesn't prevent you from finishing your project, outlining is the most important part of the writing process.
I'm torn on the phrase "Welcome in." It's phonetically nicer than just "welcome," when you're greeted upon entering a place, but isn't it redundant?
September 20 My productivity is inversely proportional to the number of things I have to do. It is directly proportional to the proximity of my most urgent deadline.
Man knows nothing about the nectar of life, except that it will not fall into him naturally like fruit from a tree; he knows that the nectar's in the knothole. Man must reach into darkness, not knowing what the mystery holds for him, because that's what the Mother made him to do.
September 19 Research (and maybe write about) Julia Hill, who lived on a small canopy at the top of a 1,000-year-old Redwood for two years to prevent a logging company from cutting it down.
Lists of four or more items suggest that there are more in the set that aren't listed. Three feels complete, exhaustive. Two suggests a contrast or tension.
If you believe in the doctrine of Original Sin, you believe that you are a victim of mortal existence rather than its beneficiary.
Books on writing contain great advice. Books on writing advice are bad books.
September 18 It's always a good day when you schedule-send an essay.
Why live life believing that you are fated to be perpetually severed from God, especially when there is so much evidence to the contrary? Is there not more evidence that God is within you and around you than there is evidence that he is elsewhere, or above you?
It's hard to do the right thing, and when we do wrong, we can't help but feel shame, guilt, and regret. So, we spun up the narrative of Original Sin so that we could hope for some other world that does not require us to be active, autonomous moral agents: Eden. And we created the myth of The Fall to justify our self-depreciation and -perceived depravity, and so that we can spend life hoping to be delivered from this world rather than using our time to learn to live within it.
Man's plight is that he cannot reach as far as what he can conceive. He can imagine what lies beyond, but no matter how far he ventures, he cannot get any closer to the horizon.
(Upon re-reading this, I realize a very odd biological connection that I am compelled to note. Of course, "man" here refers to all humans. But if you think of anatomy of intercourse and the mechanics of conception, the man (males) must literally reach with part of himself and then eject part of himself into the unknown, hoping to achieve what he can conceive (hoping to conceive of a child), and in this case the "horizon" is the cervix.)
The Nectar Is in the Knothole A three-act play of the world's mystery and man's ambition
Man has a desire for something that he cannot yet conceive. He's willing to risk his time, efforts, and wellbeing for an idea of what he might possibly reach. And what catalyzes man's effort, what justifies this risk? What is the object of his devotion and attention? The feminine, mystery.
Man looks to the moon and longs to walk on the dark side. Man looks at the swells of the sea and longs to breathe underwater. Man looks to birds in the sky and longs to fly faster and further than they can. All of these objects in the world contain the mystery of the Mother. That is what animates the man and activates his ambition, which is naturally latent. Until a man discovers a worthy mystery, he is lame and aimless. Man convinces himself that the mystery beckons him, but in fact she is simply being, not any form of striving.
Man has this aim that is most likely unattainable, yet he reaches anyway. And where must he go for it? Into the unknown. He must launch into space, leap from a high place, open his eyes underwater. Man must reach into darkness, not knowing what the mystery holds for him. Man knows nothing about the nectar of life except that it does not drip from the bark or fall like the fruit of a tree. He knows that the nectar is in the knothole.
The greatest evidence for the validity of The Fall is the fact that we created that as our origin story. After sin, Adam and Eve gain the divine knowledge of good and good evil, which makes them self-conscious and aware of their transgressions. They become shameful of their nakedness. If you read The Fall as a fantastical story about the origin of man, then it is blatantly a way to justify our negative feelings of shame and guilt and the struggle of living, and to blame our current state on our ancestors for throwing us apart from God.
We are self-conscious and shameful and guilty, so we created the story of The Fall to justify our self-hatred and depravity. Instead, why not use our time on earth to achieve self-love and live with grace? We don't have to wait for heaven; we have to create it. Heaven is how you treat other people.
The story of The Fall is true for how it describes the post-fall nature of a man: we are mortals with the divine knowledge of good and evil. But the story of The Fall is untrue for how it characterizes these traits. Are we supposed to live perpetually as if we are lacking some fundamental part of our being: a perfect union with God? No, the human plight and the path to fulfillment is to acknowledge the lack and live within it, to span the gap with the breadth of your terrestrial spirit. We have God's knowledge of morality but not his immortality. Those are the facts. The human endeavor is not to retreat, to escape this conflict but to embrace it and find peace without resolution, self-love without salvation.
Original sin made humans autonomous moral agents. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve were subject to the will of God. After eating from the tree, they gained the knowledge of good and evil and the power to do either good or evil. They finally became human because they assumed moral awareness and responsibility for their actions.
Adam and Eve had some freedom before The Fall, but they were not autonomous moral agents. That requires the knowledge of good and evil.
Life is not Sisyphean but rather asymptotic. We do not struggle in cycles and fail to reach a goal we can see. Instead, we struggle daily to stay on course toward some indeterminable goal that is ever beyond the horizon.
It's not that we fail again and again to roll a boulder up the same hill. It's that we keep rolling a boulder ever higher, over hill after hill (sometimes back-stepping, slipping, and losing progress), but our plight is that there is always a higher mountain, always a next hill.
A better way to imagine this is sailing at sea with no land to guide you or to offer respite. In the vast, formless, infinite sea, how do you navigate, and what heading do you choose? What you're headed for is always unknown to you, and you never truly know whether you're on the right course. The trick is to keep sailing anyway and take yourself as far as you can go toward an aim you choose along the horizon.
[[Die at Sea]]
September 16 Most actions and utterances are a-moral. If you become too concerned and obsess over everyone always acting morally, you can very easily slip into tyranny.
I’m a lexical conservationist concerned for the semicolon; it’s an endangered species.
I have an intellectually homoerotic relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Muir.
September 14 From what do you wish to be saved? From what do you long to be delivered? From this beautiful life?
Everyone Misunderstands Dorothy's Story
You all have the meaning of The Wizard of Oz wrong. It's not about Dorothy escaping Kansas to a wonderful dreamland. It's about the dreamland beckoning Dorothy so that it could send her on an adventure that would show the wonder she's missing in Kansas.
This misconception comes from the colloquial and dumbed-down version of this quote from the movie: "You're not in Kansas anymore." But that escapism is her delusion — that she needs something she doesn't already have. The thesis of the movie is actually expressed in the line "There's no place like home," which means that all she needs is already within her, and within her community.
There was a missed opportunity to have Dorothy wake up in the Technicolor world of Kansas, to drive the thesis home.
Other examples of colloquial phrases that betray the original thesis of the source material:
- "The customer is always right in matters of taste."
- "Jack of all trades master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one."
September 12 "Doing it on your own" includes asking for help. If you invite intervention, that's something you are doing on your own. People having to intervene due to your neglect and self-sabotage is the only form of you not doing it on your own.
Inertia and the Chaos Pendulums
Sin (self-consciousness) is the second pendulum. It's what makes human existence chaotic and a struggle rather than predictable and natural. Existence is better modeled by chaos theory than by Newtonian Physics. We are not dealing with billiard balls starting from rest on a flat table — more like asteroids hurling through space from an unknown origin, with unknown mass and momentum, and we're trying to predict their trajectory over billions of kilometers.
Simple mechanical systems can be measured backwards and forwards in time depending on their current conditions. Precisely the opposite is true for chaotic systems, which are completely and very precisely dependent on their set of initial conditions. And the most simple way to illustrate the difference between these is to compare a single pendulum vs. a double pendulum.
You can calculate the period of a simple pendulum simply by knowing its length. And there's not much else to calculate about it. It can only travel along the same arc. There is no variation or surprise.
If you attach two simple pendulum's together, by hanging one from the other, things get chaotic quickly. The motion of both pendulums is complex, though it can be calculated and predicted at low speeds. Under certain conditions, double-pendulums follow the laws of chaos theory, which means it remains a deterministic physical system that we cannot predict or measure (or that we could only do so with infinite computational power and infinitely precise measurements of the pendulum's initial conditions).
Being a human is like being a double-pendulum. Life is chaotic and unpredictable. When we gain control of one part of ourselves, another spirals. The difference between a human and an inanimate pendulum is that we have the power to bring ourselves to rest. Humans in motion tend to stay in motion, unless their will exerts upon themselves the force of stillness.
In my writing, in place of the royal we, I should write "you and I/me" — as in, e.g., "You and I are bound to the finite concrete of reality" vs. "We humans are bound...".
September 11 Why are seeds so cheap? Because it requires foresight and labor and patience before they bear any fruit. Seeds are pure potential. Everyone's looking to buy a tree. But not you — if you see a seed, holding the promise of fruits you want to reap, buy it. Plant it and tend to it, giving to it the patient labor required for anything worthwhile.
Sin is incompatible with immortality, unless we think ourselves God. You can either be a self-aware mortal human or an immortal, ignorant animal.
Women feel insecure more often and about a greater number of things (higher on average in neuroticism), and women acknowledge and express those feelings regularly; men feel fewer but often psychologically deeper insecurities that that they acknowledge and express rarely. Evidence for this is (1) that there are many more female therapists than there are male therapists and (2) that there are many more successful suicide attempts among men, even though the total number of attempts skews toward women across genders. The average woman is insecure about how she looks. The average man is insecure about whether he's worth anything at all to the world.
(A large part of this dynamic has roots in the fact that women bare children, making them inherently value able and values and useful to humanity. Men must prove their worth, lest they be a leach on society. Both men and women are instinctually aware of this.)
September 10Mystery is synonymous with femininity. If a woman is not very mysterious, she is not very feminine. Ambition is synonymous with masculinity. If a man is not very ambitious, he is not very masculine. The harmonious and well-adjusted among us are both, with one or the other attribute in the lead, at one time or another.
More evidence for my "Halloween Theory of Climaxes": Maeve and Otis finally had sex with about 6 minutes left in the penultimate episode of Season 4. The season has 8 episodes, which puts that moment almost exactly 83.4% of the way through the season. It was the start of the climax, the Halloween-moment of Sex Education's Season 4.
Dreams are immaterial experiences but experiences nonetheless.
Here's a great list of quotes on writing from writers, from Pen for Rent.
"From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I shall not put." – Winston Churchill (1874–1965)
"What are the proper proportions of a maxim? A minimum of sound to a maximum of sense." – Mark Twain (1835–1910)
"The two most engaging powers of an author are, to make new things familiar, and familiar things new." – Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
I can't find the exact quote at the moment, but I've found it to be true that, for the pieces I am most proud of, I revise and edit them until I start removing and re-inserting (or vise-versa) the same punctuation mark. You know you've reached the final draft when you start arguing with yourself about minute, arbitrary changes. It means you have already identified and changed what matters. It means it's time to publish.
I have been correcting the proofs of my poems. In the morning, after hard work, I took a comma out of one sentence…. In the afternoon I put it back again." – Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
S4:E6 of *Sex Education* might be the best of the entire series. I am a huge fan of the premise, characters, writing, and here's a list of all that I can think of that makes this episode great:
- The intro scene is 2:25 that expertly establishes backstory for Otis's Mom and her sister. It adds richness to their relationship as we know it and foreshadows a significant development between them in this episode.
- In general, this show -- especially in this season -- holds many characters at once and progresses each of their arcs a little bit each episode. It feels like there are at least three main characters and two tiers of side characters of about 4 and 8 of, respectively, equal depth and importance. It's really impressive and somehow not disorienting or confusing or redundant or boring.
- The psychological commentary in this episode is deep and true and economically communicated via the characters, without the authors's voices overriding the characters'. Jean had to have her all-out conflict with Joe, where they truly speak their minds. And that helped her realize how hard things have been for her and how she's been neglecting her health and how she hasn't been there for Otis, and that whole expulsion made her able to comfort Maeve and encourage her to return to America.
- I am so philosophically aligned with the Otis–Maeve relationship struggle and resolution. When Maeve realized that the best version of herself is elsewhere -- in America, not Moredale -- Otis didn't even think to stop her. Not only that -- he was honest in saying that it probably wouldn't work out between them. He knew that she would be better off, and likely him for different reasons, if they didn't try to do long distance, especially without a plan for being in the same place again.
- There was also the whole B-plot about accessibility and advocacy, which was tasteful, and which had been expertly teased out throughout the rest of this season. From the very first episode, you can tell that Cavandish is fake-progressive, or maybe fake-inclusive. They put on the appearance of being fully happy and healthy and well but neglect what students actually need. The whole thing is tasteful and well-considered (not dogmatic in favor of or dismissive of either camp).
- Adam also had a big episode. He made a big mistake at work, which made him feel like he wasn't worthy and that he would be a disappointment to his dad. He confronts his dad about this and tells him how he actually feels, which surely liberates him and gives his dad a wake-up call to get out into the world and do something that would make his son proud, as well as finding a way to make him feel truly loved.
- Then, the episode ends with Maeve leaving Otis to return to America, but first returning to the trailer park to scatter her mom's ashes with Amie and Isaac. They say goodbye to Erin over the backdrop of the rows of campers, and it's beautiful. I cried (because I am a Maeve stan and want the best for her, even if it means leaving Otis, which you could kind of guess from how the season was going).
Like all great fiction, this episode's beats were inevitable but not predictable. It's a masterpiece. The next episode is the season and series finale.
September 8 The thesis of The Good Place: The best place is to be in The Bad Place and believe it’s The Good Place.
September 7 Quarter-Life Conundrums: The questions I will keep pursuing even if they have no answers
September 6 It's easy to change your bearing and hard to change your heading. A lot of suffering in life comes from the awareness that the two are not congruent.
I need some place to go in the morning and something to do in the evening.
September 5 Ethics Case Study:
You're waiting for a coffee, and they call your order but not your name. You just ordered (something complicated), so you know it's someone else's but grab it anyway and walk away. When the other person steps in, you say "That's mine," you dismiss them by saying "No, this is my order." You are able to get on with your day, and they have to wait.
What exactly have you done wrong, and what punishment is due to you?
You have both stolen and lied. But this would be a legal case of theft. It's a theft of time, really, not property. Are you, the due the punishment of wasting the equivalent 2 minutes that you caused the other person to wait? What are the ethical implications of an action like this — harm and dishonesty on such a small scale. It's easy to justify, but if you justify it, doesn't that make you even more morally flawed?
An Ethics of Attrition
What if you are born with grace (rather than in sin) but that you only have finite units of grace that you either hold or lose based on your actions. (Maybe you can gain them back too?) If you're born with 1,000 grace-units, let's say the murderer loses his grace completely — minus 1,000. And maybe a white lie is only -5.
Kant and Nietzsche are not contradictory but complementary.
Read Robert Pogue Harrison's book Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, which was covered in the article "Gardens," by Tulika Bahadur, which was recommended to me by David Perell.
Camus is not nihilistic. Absurdism advocates the following: (1) the fundamental characteristic of existence is the conflict between our desire for meaning and the universe's indifference; (2) the proper response to this fact is not to deny it (nihilism) or escape it by making claims to meaning you find/create (philosophical suicide / bad faith) but to revolt and live within the absurd; (3) a life lived this way is one that is honest and authentic, but it will not offer resolution or reconciliation.
I totally hear you about being bored or repulsed by Meursalt, but The Stranger (like all of Camus fiction) does not positively express a philosophical position. Rather, Camus's characters highlight the difficulty of confronting the absurd, and their flaws illustrate how one could accept the absurdity of existence yet fail to revolt. If anything, his characters' philosophies should be read as a half-antithesis to Camus's. The real value in The Stranger and The Fall, for instance, is that they enumerate the ways we delude ourselves and the many ways the absurd can eat you, what it looks like to fail to revolt.
Meursalt is an unhappy Sisyphus. Camus advocates for a way of living where, even though we're trapped within a Sisyphean struggle, we can still be happy and grateful and where we can still enjoy existence.
September 4 What does the monkey do when it sees itself?
Introspection is not an effort-full process of digging into yourself. Rather, it is a free and faithful dive inwards.
To overcome, go under. To transcend yourself, you must first descended into yourself. And if you want to go deeper, don't dig; dive.
Ansel Adam's photography is incredible. The Sierra Nevada focus and the style gave me the same transcendent vibes as John Muir's writing, so it was pleasantly unsurprising to find a gallery of Adams's work indexed on a map of the John Muir trail.
If I were to buy Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail (which I probably will do), it would be my favorite coffee-table book of all time.
In 1938, Ansel Adams and the Sierra Club published a remarkable book that reflected the incredible grace and grandeur of the heart of the Sierra Nevada and the trail that runs through it.
September 3 In my dreams, I often do one-arm pull-ups. Someday, that will trigger lucidity — hopefully before I am able to do it in real life and it stops being a dream-sign.
The most important stage of the creative act is incubation, the time between conceiving the idea and it being ready to hatch. You have to sit on it. (Just as rest is the most important step in the decision-making process. You have to sleep on it.)
That means two things: the creative act beings with spontaneous, generative action to create at least an embryo. Then, you can let the idea mature as you move about and work on other things. And if you try to go from nothing to a full-bodied something, you'll crack open the egg to realize that not only is it not ready to hatch but also that it hasn't even been fertilized. You'll just have a runny yoke, the mess of a poorly conceived idea.
Here's Marc Forsyth explaining chiasmus on HIW
Read Rupert Sheldrake's The Science Delusion. I was very impressed by his banned Ted Talk, published on YouTube by After Skool.
The primary writing lessons DFW aimed to teach his college Comp students (from "Authority & American Usage"):
(1) Do not presume that the reader can read your mind — anything that you want the reader to visualize or consider or conclude, you must provide; (2) do not presume that the reader feels the same way that you do about a given experience or issue — your argument cannot just assume as true the very things you’re trying to argue for.
Did Adam and Eve want to live in Eden? Before sin, that question would have been non-sensical. Does a squirrel want to build a family? Can a cow want to write a book? No, they are merely moved to gather and graze; they are incapable of wanting and striving, incapable of failing.
Oh, so you want to return to Eden? Does that also mean you are eager to become sub-human?
The only true form of security is the safety net you string for yourself, and that you cinch up higher, keeping it close to you as you ascend. No one thing is secure, so you can only truly be secure if you're completely comfortable and confident falling into something else (the depths of yourself) and having to climb your way up again.
E.g., "If I lose my job and can't find another I like and stop making money, I could always make a pilgrimage to Nepal and live as a monk and be happy and still until I die. So, getting fired wouldn't be so bad."
Meursault is not a moral model (like Jesus), but he still embodies a philosophy. It's an awareness and acceptance of the absurd without the revolt. In other words, Meursault lacks a primary characteristic of Camus's philosophy that would lead him to a more sound morality.
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