I once heard a philosopher tell a story about a student who asked him what he ought to do with his life. “Do what you want,” the philosopher said. “But I don’t want to do what I want to do,” the student protested. “I want to do what I ought to do.”
My vision of retirement has always been to move someplace hot, and sit out on a patio reading (or re-reading) 19th century Anglo-American books (Stevenson, Melville, Conrad, Hawthorne, Kipling, Chesterton, etc.) That’s all I want to do.
The two saddest words in the English language: “What party?”
A good life is not a life without problems. A good life is a life with good problems.
Green Eggs and Ham
by Dr. SeussTom has finally made his peace with this book, but it took a while. He used to enjoy having it read to him right up to the point where our hero is finally forced, by ‘Sam I Am’, to try the titular dish. Then Tom would grab the book and throw it across the room. He had heard what happened after that, and didn’t like the message the book was trying to impart. So, for Tom, this was for a while the tale of a proud individualist who even having been forced into a train wreck by a pseudonymous terrorist, possibly working for Big Ham, then lost at sea, would still not give in and submit to the ham agenda.
As someone who finds that part of ‘Cars’ where Lightning McQueen is forced to stay in a small town and learn about values to be a paranoid nightmare in the tradition of 'The Prisoner’, I must say I rather supported Tom’s stance. However, it’s probably for the best that he’s now started to let us read the book to the end. Like Winston Smith in '1984’, he now loves 'Green Eggs and Ham’.
Friday Links
- The Best Book on American Poetry Ever
- From the Public Domain Review, a quaint and curious trip down ephemera lane: Christmas Festive Bonanza Digest
- How to write a Verbatim poem
- The Lost Art of Memorizing Poetry | The American Reader
- Maybe this is why I'm finding NPR's news hosts' attempts to emulate chirpy chatter ever more annoying: NPR is graying, and public radio is worried about it - The Washington Post
What their return to health will look like: As the INTJ returns to health, they will shift their focus away from petty details and regain their big-picture mindset. They will develop an increased concentration on goals and long-term projects, which will bring them steadily closer to what they want out of the future. A healthy INTJ is an INTJ who can synthesize and carry out long-term projects – in as efficient a manner as possible.
There’s this book club phenomenon — my mother-in-law is in a book club and now my wife is in a book club — and so I’ve heard any number of people say they get the “gist” of books. They haven’t read the book. They say, “I read enough to get the gist.” Just, no. Don’t. I can’t engage in that conversation. You don’t get the gist of Jane Austen. You either read Jane Austen or you don’t.
What appears at first to be an absence of emotion then appears to be a need to control overwhelming emotion that is apt to surface without warning.