nick

"Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things."

- Ray Bradbury

I am susceptible to frivolity. I know this about myself. I love beauty; I am weak to surfaces; I am apt to mistake eccentricity for character. I drink more than I should. I love overdressing; I love staying up past midnight; I love breakfasts at all-night diners, and the Irish coffees you order when you can’t decide whether it’s night or morning.

The first hard choice

You must spend your life walking through fields of lotuses, listening to the beautiful music of the sirens.

Always, you could come closer to the sirens, and risk destroying yourself.

Always, you could eat more of the lotus, and you could choose to abandon what matters.

This is the first hard choice. You must choose to be the kind

When I talk about enjoying the void, I’m aware that this might sound like a kind of suicidal, or life-denying impulse. It’s the opposite, though. It’s not that I don’t want more life, or that I act without concern for my physical safety. I really like life and the body I happen to live in. It’s just that I experience it as gratuitous, something