Why You Should Tilt at Windmills (and Other Quixotic Reflections) (excerpt)

Finally, of course, I speak of nothing except the modest topic: How shall we lead our lives? I think of a man I admire as much as anyone, the English sculptor Henry Moore, eighty-four as I write these notes, eighty when I spoke with him last. "Now that you are eighty," I asked him, "would you tell me the secret of life?" Being a confident and eloqu

It’s better to prefer incompleteness over completeness; capacious imagination instead of futures that are too specific or neat; and experimentation and exploration over visions and blueprints. I’m sceptical of overly coherent utopias or the belief that societies follow simple logics. Instead, I see the work of imagination (and the life of real soci

Really, of course, what makes the new endeavor more appealing is just that we’re seeing it at a mental distance; we fail to realize, in the words of the psychology writer Jude King, that ‘every worthwhile goal is supposed to feel hard, unglamorous, unsexy,’ at least for some of the time you’re actually putting in the work.

An Impossible Task, a Worthy Goal