Oddments of High Unimportance

jellobiafrasays:

the psychopathology of everyday life (1951 ed.)

pickyourheadup:

The Nightmare.

Dimon keeps track of his bank’s business by scribbling on a sheet of paper in his coat’s breast pocket. The notes are divided into two columns: one for “things I owe people” and the other for “things people owe me,” according to people who’ve worked with Dimon. “He carries it until he’s used every square centimeter and the paper is old and crinkled,” says Michael Welborn, the former head of retail banking at Bank One, which Dimon ran before he merged it into JPMorgan Chase. “He is unbelievable at grasping details and the big picture at the same time.”

On one of my last visits, even as my father was in severe pain, he asked me the same question he always did: What are you reading?

I fluffed my feathers a bit and said: Kierkegaard. “What is he telling you?” asked my dad. I had just been reading a volume of Kierkegaard’s journals on the train, immersed in the poetic ruminations of the great Danish philosopher. So I immediately spouted, verbatim and with the appropriate pauses for world-weary effect, the words I still remember to this day: “No individual can assist or save the age. He can only express that it is lost.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, my dad retorted: “He’s right. But that’s exactly why you must try to assist and save the age.”

In that one moment, my dad put a callow youth gently in his place, out-existentialized the great existentialist and gave me words to conduct a career by.

More and more I feel that, just as all art aspires to the condition of music, all humour should really aspire to the condition of Wodehouse.

(via Philip Sandifer: Writer: There’s Another Way: Throw Away Your Guns (The Family of Blood))

(via ‘How Dare It Make Me Feel So Much’: The Spell of F. Scott Fitzgerald - Joe Fassler - The Atlantic)

(via All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go | Ann Friedman | The Baffler)

(via Facebook Feminism, Like It or Not | Susan Faludi | The Baffler)