Jay Matthews

"Five years from now, what will your future self think of your current self? Will you even be the same person?"

With children and with works of art, there’s no recipe that will take the place of dwelling alongside and knitting your beings together. There’s no success or failure, pride or disappointment, that will justify or invalidate those years of dwelling.

The upside is so powerful that it often masks the downside, which is why so many people find themselves in a state of automaton conformity:

• we gain a community that (superficially) makes us feel secure; we do not feel isolated or out of place or weird;


• we are provided with (and rewarded for taking) shortcuts for what to believe in, what to do, and

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intimacy comes with a growing concern for the well-being of the other person, which includes a fear of hurting her. But sexual excitement requires the capacity not to worry, and the pursuit of pleasure demands a degree of selfishness. Some people can’t allow themselves this selfishness, because they’re too absorbed with the well-being of the... See more

No matter what path we are on we feel the pressure to always be doing and orienting ourselves in ways that might help us in our careers. It convinces us we need to ship, produce, have an impact, and make money, or we are a failure.

I wrote in the woods and on the scrap pile and in the loft of the barn. My stories were full of nature because that’s where I wrote. Being in the woods, being myself, and writing words down didn’t seem like separate concepts.

One month ago I quit my corporate job... I did it now because I realised that I had been sleepwalking through my life. I did it now because the alternatives were so much worse.

“Frank is really collecting this kind of brainpower around him,” says Niemi. “He’s the attraction, the magnet who gets people to come together.”

Marinetti’s ambition was not merely to launch a new literary school. Rather he aspired to found a utopian, revolutionary movement of both national and global dimensions.