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.

This is the quiet art of living well. It does not demand that we abandon the world, but that we engage with it more mindfully. It asks that we slow down, that we look more closely, that we listen more carefully. For in doing so, we discover that much of what we seek—clarity, peace, even strength—was always within reach. It was simply waiting for us

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“We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them,” she insisted, “but by waiting for them.”3

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.

If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.

Freud defined depression as anger turned inwards. There’s some truth to this for sure, but I think the great existential psychologist Rollo May defined it more accurately: “Depression is the inability to construct a future.”