The New Romantics

Which brings us back to the question of traditionalism and dynamism, and their potential interaction: if you have had a cultural revolution that cleared too much ground, razed too many bastions and led to a kind of cultural debasement and forgetting, you probably need to go backward, or least turn that way for recollection, before you can hope to... See more

The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.

atomization encourages us to reduce multivariate experiences, often the most important parts of life, to their single most obvious element

This is intelligence. Not in the IQ sense, but in the "I know what matters" sense. In the "I know who I am without the algorithm telling me" sense.

Trend is not inherently bad. But when you build your identity around it, you become a vessel for the algorithm—not a creator of your own world.

The only antidote I've found to the madness of my own brain is to talk to other people and be around other people. Somehow, through conversation and through seeing and being seen, I feel less terrible. I wouldn't say I feel great neccessarily, I just feel less bad.

Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper . Allen points out that “people often start diaries in times of upheaval,”

But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” — a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society.