This rant via Shalom Auslander

I was thinking about sex the other day because I was having a really depressing day, and a dead body had been found by the pier, and as I was taking my son to school and waiting at a traffic light, a homeless man in a mad fury began circling my car, shouting and spitting, and it felt like forever before the light turne

The antidote to envy is one's own work. Always one's own work. Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it… [T]he work itself. It drives the spooks away.

-Bonnie Friedman

Building meaning is what makes us happy.

- Katherine Morgan Schafler

How can we live offline?

INTERVIEWER:
Do you find emotional stability is necessary in order to write? Or can you get to work whatever your state of mind? Is your mood reflected in what you write? How do you describe that perfect state in which you can write from early morning into the afternoon?

OATES:
One must be pitiless about this matter of “mood.” In a sense, the writing

Charlie Becker wrote about “psychological richness” and I wonder if that ties into my new thinking on leisure (it feels dirty to turn leisure into a framework, but here it is:). Nature, friendship, art, culture, psyche. “Richness” feels like a relevant word because these 5 points are a kind of satisfaction that can’t be bought (your aesthetic appre