Life and times of Jason since 2001
Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal.
— C.S. Lewis
Read on socialsocialdistanceclub.substack.com/p/day-22-the-gratitude-tense
I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and travelled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
”Sanity is a handicap and liability if you’re living in a mad world.”
– Anthony Burgess
— from memex.naughtons.org/monday-18-november-2024/40083/
“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
Joan Didion 1975 Commencement Address at the University of California, Riverside
I want to remind readers that Facebook was not started for news. Our readers took news there because we in our field did not provide the mechanisms for them to share it and discuss it with friends outside of awful comments sections. Twitter was not started for news; our readers, as witnesses to news, chose to share it there. Google was not started for news; our industry could not get its act together (see: New Century Network) to provide an overview of the news ecosystem. We could have started Next Door to allow our local readers to meet with neighbors years ago, but Silicon Valley beat us to it. Our readers deserted us because the net provided mechanisms we did not. And we did not because our colleagues in news have been too busy trying to find new ways to pay for old ways instead.
Jeff Jarvis – CJR: Talking with Jeff Jarvis about forcing Big Tech to pay for news
And I think that the ultimate way you and I get lucky is if you have some success early in life, you get to find out early it doesn’t mean anything. Which means you get to start early the work of figuring out what does mean something.
David Foster Wallace
Life is to live and life is to give and talents are
Fr. Solanus Casey
to use for good if you choose.
Do not pray for easy lives.
Pray to be stronger.
Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers.
Pray for powers equal to your tasks —
then the doing of your work shall be no
miracle but you shall be a miracle.
Every day you shall wonder at yourself …
at the richness of life which has come
to you by the grace of God. But everyone
needs someone — knowing that
somewhere someone is thinking of you.
Sometimes you get your ass whooped, right? And it doesn’t go your way. And you got to take your whooping and move on and get better and come back to the next thing.
Mike Rhoades
Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man.
Benjamin Franklin
Geez, if I could get through to you, kiddo, that depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling. Reduction, see? Of all feeling. People who keep stiff upper lips find that it’s damn hard to smile.
Judith Guest, Ordinary People
