March 2013
10 posts
“`Have you made your peace with your God?’
`I never quarreled with my God.’
`But aren’t you concerned about the next world?’
`One world at a time.’” —Last words of Henry David Thoreau, speaking with his aunt on his deathbed. (via gaws)
`I never quarreled with my God.’
`But aren’t you concerned about the next world?’
`One world at a time.’” —Last words of Henry David Thoreau, speaking with his aunt on his deathbed. (via gaws)
January 2013
1 post
August 2012
1 post
“The big thing that’s changed has been the external environment of what it means to teach in university. Universities used to be communities; they used to be places where intellectual life really happened. They were also places where avant-garde stuff was happening. And that’s – in England anyway – completely ground to a halt. Universities are largely sold as factories for production of increasingly uninteresting, depressed people wandering around complaining. There’s been a middle-management take-over of our education, and it’s depressing. So universities, like the university I was at – Essex, which was a radical, experimental, small university, but had a bad reputation but did some great stuff – have become a kind of pedestrian, provincial university run by bureaucrats. That was one of the reasons why I got out when I got out in 2004.”
—Fantastic interview with Simon Critchley, who writes The New York Times’s excellent philosophy blog The Stone and whose guides to how to read the classics remain indispensable. (via explore-blog)
July 2012
60 posts
“This is what you do. If you feel low, you stand tall. You mess up, you move on. You want to try something, try it, and if it was a stupid thing to try, you look it in the eye. There’s no turning back. You apologize if you’re sorry, but know that the nimblest, strongest hands can’t rebuild a bridge out of embers, so cut new wood. Start from scratch. You love with your whole heart. If you’re jealous, talk yourself from the ledge. If you can’t talk yourself down from the ledge, have a good time up there, looking down on the world. If you have to lie to make everything true again, lie like you mean it. If you find yourself in a cage, reach out through the bars for the key, unlock the door, and run away. If running away gets dangerous, run home. If home doesn’t mean what it used to mean, decide what home will be in the future. If your best friend says she doesn’t trust you, hold her jaw in your hand until it hurts, and make her face you. Thats all it takes. If you think you love a guy, see how his hand looks in yours, thats all it takes. If you get exiled into a new land, then go discover it. And if you feel like you’re drowning, go swimming.”
—Hobson Brown (via slekes)
