Reclaim The Brain

The point Klinenberg wanted to make was this: If there was no such thing as a library, and someone proposed it today, there's a 99.9% chance they and their “radical and crazy idea” would be laughed out of the room.

But, as we know, it’s not a crazy idea.

In 1938 humans were offered three global stories to choose from, in 1968 just two, and in 1998 a single story seemed to prevail. In 2018 we are down to zero. No wonder that the liberal elites, who dominated much of the world in recent decades, are in a state of shock and disorientation. To have one story is the most reassuring situation of all.

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Mary Oliver said, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

If you do not deep read, you do not cultivate a capacity to think, imagine, and create; you therefore may not realize that anything more satisfying than a video game even exists.

It is tempting, in moments of ambition, to think that we must change everything all at once, that the path to mastery or peace requires a sudden, dramatic shift. But this is rarely the case. In truth, most lasting changes come from small, deliberate actions. It is in the repetition of these small actions, over time, that we build strength, that we... See more

As a method, marginalia remind us that all annotation is allusive, that all literature is connected to everything else, that the reader influences the writer as surely as the other way around, and even if the later has been dead for centuries.

“Faith is better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a process than as a possession,” wrote Frederick Buechner. ”It is on-again-off-again rather than once-and-for-all. Faith is not being sure where you're going, but going anyway. A journey without maps.”