digital garden
Once upon a time people were born into communities and had to find their individuality. Today people are born individuals and have to find their communities.” — K-Hole, “Youth Mode,”
All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.
Ursula K. Le Guin • Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books
“You may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
Thinking benefits from a similar principle of “time under tension.” It is the ability to sit patiently with a group of barely connected or disconnected ideas that allows a thinker to braid them together into something that is combinatorially new.
All my crises are scrawled in the margins of the novels I’ve read over and over again, sometimes to feel safe, sometimes to sink willfully into further despair.
Sarah Chihaya • Bibliophobia
Probably not, because you’re just crying, for God’s sake, and you cry all the time what with all the current apocalypses, especially if you’re not doing so well at work, or you spent too much time reading comments online, or people are moving on with their lives around you, or families are making their normal, irremediable family trouble.
Sarah Chihaya • Bibliophobia
I can’t pinpoint almost any of what happened then in single events, both because I could never directly look at them in the first place, and because I can’t see them directly in retrospect now. I can only tell you how the tissue of time around and between them felt.