Joseph

“And I think it was memory that saved us. You see, we have already known that

But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options.

You’d simply drown. We all would. It’s amazing to me that no one much talks about this—about the fact that whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed citizenry can no longer exist, at least not without a whole new modern degree of subcontracting and dependence packed into what we mean by ‘informed.

Present. They understand the business. This doesn’t work if you come from management consulting, and now you’re a general manager who doesn’t really know the domain. That wouldn’t work as well.

Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter. Such openness and empathy M. had in abundance, and gave away freely... I was in my late twenties and early thirties, and well filled with a sense of my own thoughts, my own presence. I was eager to address the worl... See more

Fiction’s abyss is si-lence, nada. Whereas nonfiction’s abyss is To-tal Noise, the seething static of every particu-lar thing and experience, and one’s total free-dom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and represent and connect, and how, and why, etc.

Gathering is the tender and thoughtful collection of goods for your kin, and a moment for reunion, for celebration, and for introspection around those goods.

Marshall McLuhan was spot on here -"people prefer bad news to good news, because bad news provides them with a "survival emotion" while good news threatens them with change