Brian Sholis
@briansholis
Brian Sholis
* “All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die.”
thevalueofsparrows.wordpress.com • WORDS: Friendship by David Whyte
- “It’s striking to think that the past has weight not just because it influences the future but because it has its own intrinsic value.”
The New Yorker • Being in Time
- “My discomfort with our current use of “relevance” as a term of judgment is that it conceals its criteria, and that those criteria are not aesthetic, but social and political. I worry that if we make such “relevance” not just one among other judgments we might make about art, but a condition of our interest, we have made that condition purely... See more
Garth Greenwell • Just a moment...
Status Signaling and
* “There was no “winning” this war; every act of defense and every show of loyalty served to keep the fight alive. This explains the curious fact that for all the fighting people do against cancellation, no cancelee ever vanquishes her cancelers.”
New York Times • Opinion | If I Get Canceled, Let Them Eat Me Alive (Published 2022)
2019 profile of Wendell Berry by Amanda Petrusich.
Archive-friendly link: https://archive.is/wMaf1
WB: “The thing that worries me very much is how much language we’re using now that is so abstract as to require no thought at all. I mean very important words. Justice, for instance. I had a list, I think, of eleven kinds of justice. Restorative justice, climate justice, economic justice, social justice, and so on. The historian John Lukacs, whose work I greatly respect, said that “the indiscriminate pursuit of justice . . . may lay the world to waste.” And he invoked modern war, which kills indiscriminately for the sake of some “justice.” He thought the pursuit of truth, small “t,” much safer. I want to remember—and this comes to me from my dad, to some extent—that our system of justice requires a finding of truth, and it labors to see that justice is never done by one person.”
WB: “Once you accept that something or somebody is exploitable, there’s another limitlessness. Exploitation leads, with perfect logic, to exhaustion. And our ways of land use exploit both land and people.”
WB: “You must either decide this is worth working at, or just leave it undone. Marriage is not perfect agreement. But you’ve accepted this other person into your mind. I work alone, but always with her presence in my mind. And she is somebody I want to impress. I’m going to write this with the hope that it’ll help her to love me. I feel the stakes are pretty high. I’m in a conversation with her that hasn’t ended yet.”
WB; “Our dominant practice now is to solve problems with other problems.”
WB: “You can’t think about the issues we’re talking about without finally having to talk about mystery. You’ll finally have to talk about the commitment that doesn’t see any end. That’s a life that you are not going to be able to prescribe, that finally you’re not in charge of.”
- "“How do you pass the time?” suggests the basic model of existence, in which living a life is seen on the one hand as traversing an unspecified span of time—marked out in years—and on the other, as moving through the natural cycle of hours, from dawn to dusk. Time, then, is understood to be a medium one negotiates. And in this respect: how do I... See more
Lapham's Quarterly • Strange Days | Sven Birkerts
1. Your career is not your life2. Explore, then exploit3. Don't do the job you want to tell other people you do. Do the job you want to do.4. Be ruthlessly honest with yourself about what you value—and how much professional success matters to you5. Flow comes from voluntary, difficult, worthwhile work
Derek Thompson • Your Career Is Just One-Eighth of Your Life
The Point | A magazine of the examined life
thepointmag.com