Book: Havel: A Life, by Michael Zantovsky.
It's too soon for #quotesporn, I know. But I was just reading a review of a new biography of Vaclav Havel. I admire Vaclav Havel and his story is an amazing one. Havel was a successful playwright in the 1960s during the Prague Spring. The Soviet tanks moved in on Czechoslovakia in 1968. In 1976, an underground rock group called Plastic People of the Universe was arrested by the Soviet Union. Havel and others wrote a petition calling on the Communist government to honour human rights. He was imprisoned for this.
By 1989, Soviet control was collapsing and Vaclav Havel became President of Czechoslovakia surrounded by a "motley crew of long-haired advisers."
Here's the quote from the book:
- No one knew how to deal with the military. The head of the president’s military office had to be a general, but all of the generals had gone through Communist indoctrination. The candidates answered every question monosyllabically, until Zantovsky thought to ask them what they read at bedtime: “One apparently only read the statutes and the order of battle manuals, the second read all the Marxist classics in Russian, and the third, slightly more enlightened, enjoyed reading histories of battles and campaigns from Hannibal to von Clausewitz. The fourth, an antiaircraft missile brigade commander, hesitated for a long time, after which he stuttered: ‘Catch-22.’ It was no contest.”
The book review is online and is worth reading. If you can get into the New York Times, it's here
One Havel quote has stayed with me since I first heard it. About his imprisonment, Havel said: "If you become bitter in a bitter place, then the place has won."
Anyhow: give us a quote from your recent reading, even if you are only reading the book review.
“The things you learn in maturity aren’t simple things such as acquiring information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive behavior. You learn not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions. You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world loves talent but pays off on character. “You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you; they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.” -John Gardner (Qtd. in NYT 1/6/15)
I checked the John Gardner quotation in the NYT article, "The Problem with Meaning" by David Brooks. I also read the first several of the NYT picks of the comments. These add several important dimensions to the article. Your chosen quote, though, of the things you learn in maturity - is very well stated. I'm not sure if those things you learn in maturity are teachable. Another quote by David Brooks is in one of the comments: "Everyone is born with a mind...but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience and finding an organizing purpose that you build a unique individual self."
I speculate that introspection and observation might be teachable to a certain extent. Some people are very resistant to introspecting or have brains that are constructed so as to make it more difficult.
I actually think Brooks is a blowhard and not often correct. That's why I didn't link the article from which I pulled the quote. Given that it wasn't Brooks who came up with it, I didn't find it necessary to give him any credit. He does, however, happen to be correct in that little snippet you pulled. The rest of the OpEd is garbage, IMO.
Some of the commentators share your opinion. I actually didn't read the Brooks article yet. But my question involves what is teachable. Can introspection be taught? Perhaps taught is the wrong word... maybe prodded is better. Prodding people towards introspection might be the best we can do.
If only everyone realized this. This was one of the most substantial things I've been conscious of in the last two years; an element of maturity for sure.You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you; they are thinking about themselves.
I actually just said this same thing to a girl I go to class with who was having some social anxiety issues. I hope it helped, I really do.
Just finished listening to Slaughterhouse Five on the drive in this morning. This is a long one, but it killed me:It was The Gospel From Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space... [who] made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.
But the Gospels actually taught this:
Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.
The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought...:
Oh, boy — they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!
And that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well connected. So it goes.
The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.
So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that too, since the Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.
And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of the Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!
Now read A Man Without a Country! It's a must if you dig Vonnegut.
The friends I left that parting day,
How changed, as time has sped!
Young childhood grown, strong manhood gray,
And half of all are dead. I hear the loved survivors tell
How nought from death could save,
Till every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave.
From My Childhood Home I See Again by Abraham Lincoln. I range the fields with pensive tread,
And pace the hollow rooms,
And feel (companion of the dead)
I’m living in the tombs.
In regards to ending a story a writer from Parks and Recreation had this to say: "The ending of a story should be both tragic and inevitable" It's from the book "Poking the Dead Frog" and I'll have to look up which writer said it. But it really really struck a chord with me because this is EXACTLY how all of my favorite stories end (although I wouldn't have been able to express it so eloquently) . It also happens to be very direct yet open enough for writers to interpret as they wish. I think it's a great piece of advice.
I'd like to see the context of that quotation. Given that the end of life is both tragic and inevitable, I can see a kind of biologic necessity in that statement -- but stories? I'd like to add "tragic, inevitable, but with the possibility of redemption. By redemption, I mean that the protagonist has in some way changed, thus pushing back the dark just a little more.
"No one sees the barn," he said finally. A long silence followed. "Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn." He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others. "We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies." There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. "Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism." Another silence ensued. "They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said. He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film. "What was the barn like before it was photographed?" he said. "What did it look like, how was it different from the other barns, how was it similar to other barns?" —White Noise, Don DelilloSeveral days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.
-- Clarke's first law Has come up a few times now in different placesWhen a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
And JethroTulli, since it's temporally relevant: -- Philip GreenspunComputer programming ... is a bit like writing. It is used almost everywhere, it is something that you get better at with practice, but it isn’t necessarily a fit subject for study on its own.
Sometimes, a fun thing to do is have overwhelming anxiety slowly tear you apart from the inside.
The boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse
not only as if he'd been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway. Would have known that there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it and would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed for as long as it took until he came upon one and he would have known that that was what he sought and it would have been.
All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
I just started reading Game of Thrones. Please don't give me wedgies.My mind is my weapon. My brother has his sword, King Robert has his warhammer, and I have my mind... And a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.
Swann's Way by Marcel ProustBut then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as "seeing some one we know" is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen.
- Kingdom Hearts Not a book, but it struck me as sort of encompassing my feelings of KH as a whole. There aren't many games that are about family/friendship. Both are really important to me, so it gets kind of stale seeing the same romance subplot in all the shit I play, or watch, or sometimes even read. Beyond that, I think it's hard to talk about friendship without sounding cheesy or even infantile, and KH bypasses that pitfall rather gracefully. It's the same reason why my sister and I love Gravity Falls. When the show's creator was pitching it to different networks, he always got the same response - "So the siblings are supposed to hate each other, right?" Part of his response: Which is what my sister and I are like. If you can pull off familial concepts well in a TV show or book or movie or game or whatever, I'll find it pretty impressive. /tangentIn your hand, take this Key. So long as you have the makings, then through this simple act of taking, its wielder you shall one day be. And you will find me, friend—no ocean will contain you then. No more borders around, or below, or above, so long as you champion the ones you love.
They've known each other forever. They should occasionally finish each other sentences, they should recognize when one of them is about to do something they always do, they should reference past inside jokes, they should get instantly angry at each other and then instantly make up, the way people who've known each other forever do.
I am cheating. This is not really recent reading. This is my favorite quote from the stellar article/interview with James Fallon who discovered he was psychopathic/had psychopathic brain patterns in mid-life. The quote comes from a part of the article where he is talking about interpersonal relationships and how he doesn't connect to people emotionally the way most of us do. It really resonates with me because sometimes I push potential romance away, and sometimes I say I'm not capable of having a successful long-term permanent relationship, and sometimes I just cop like I don't want one or care. But I know that deep down under it all, yeah, I feel the pull of the romantic notion. Even a psychopath feels the appeal of it, and he acknowledges it, and its universality. Everyone wants love, even though they might push it away or deny it or squander it when they have it. I'm getting "the romantic notion" tattooed on my ribcage at some point (possibly today!). (Don't worry guys, this is a plan that's been in the works for some time.) It may not be comfortable or even useful, always, to admit to that desire for connection and romance - but I think it's really important to acknowledge and remember that it's there.Sometimes the truth is not just that it hurts, but that it's just so disappointing. You want to believe in romance and have romance in your life—even the most hardcore, cold intellectual wants the romantic notion. It kind of makes life worth living.