Justin Lancy

Disciplines, like nations, are a necessary evil that enable human beings of bounded rationality to simplify their goals and reduce their choices to calculable limits. But parochialism is everywhere, and the world badly needs international and interdisciplinary travelers to carry new knowledge from one enclave to another. —Herbert A. Simon[14]

In the world of good stories everything is linked by surprise. There only the unpredictable is logical. The laws of the world of stories operate inversely to those of the world we call reality.

The Chinese term chi ku, “eat bitterness,” is shorthand for being tough, doing what it takes, bearing hardship.

To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.

To be history in America doesn’t mean to be recorded, noted, added to the narrative, but precisely the opposite, to be gone, banished, left behind. To be history is to be cut from the story.

CRAFT MUST HAVE CLOTHES BUT TRUTH LOVES TO GO NAKED

Immersion writing has huge potential for sowing empathy in the world. It’s a way to introduce readers to strangers and to make them care, a way to shine a light into places that need it.

“The whole difference between construction and creation,” wrote G. K. Chesterton, “is this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.”54

We cannot market our way out of corporatism.