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Blind Impatience Is Equally Evident In The Fruit Section. Our Ancestors Might Have Delighted In The Occasional Handful Of Berries Found On The Underside Of A Bush In Late Summer, Viewing It As A Sign Of The Unexpected Munificence Of A Divine Creator, But We Became Modern When We Gave Up On Awaiting Sporadic Gifts From Above And Sought To Render Any Pleasing Sensation Immediately And Repeatedly Available.

-Alain De Botton

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Blind Impatience Is Equally

Alain De Botton

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Blind Impatience Is Equally Evident In The Fruit Section. Our Ancestors Might Have Delighted In The Occasional Handful Of Berries Found On The Underside Of A Bush In Late Summer, Viewing It As A Sign Of The Unexpected Munificence Of A Divine Creator, But We Became Modern When We Gave Up On Awaiting Sporadic Gifts From Above And Sought To Render Any Pleasing Sensation Immediately And Repeatedly Available.

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There May Be Significant Things To Learn About People By Looking At What Annoys Them Most.

Significant Things

When You Look At The Moon, You Think, ‘i’m Really Small. What Are My Problems?’ It Sets Things Into Perspective. We Should All Look At The Moon A Bit More Often.

Sweetness Is The Opposite Of Machismo, Which Is Everywhere-and I Really Don't Get On With Machismo. I'm Interested In Sensitivity, And Weakness, And Fear, And Anxiety, Because I Think That, At The End Of The Day, Behind Our Masks, That's What We Are.

We Feel Something, And Reach Out For The Nearest Phrase Or Hum With Which To Communicate, But Which Fails To Do Justice To What Has Induced Us To Do So....we Stay On The Outside Of Our Impressions, As If Staring At Them Through A Frosted Window, Superficially Related To Them, Yet Estranged From Whatever Has Eluded Casual Definition.

The Arab-israeli Conflict Is Also In Many Ways A Conflict About Status: It's A War Between Two Peoples Who Feel Deeply Humiliated By The Other, Who Want The Other To Respect Them. Battles Over Status Can Be Even More Intractable Than Those Over Land Or Water Or Oil.

Unnatural To Expect That Learning To Be Happy Should Be Any Easier Than, Say, Learning To Play The Violin Or Require Any Less Practice.

Do You Love Me Enough That I May Be Weak With You? Everyone Loves Strength, But Do You Love Me For My Weakness? That Is The Real Test.

Architects Themselves Tend To Shy Away From The Word, Preferring Instead To Talk About The Manipulation Of Space.

The Degree Of Sympathy We Feel Regarding Another's Fiasco Is Directly Proportional To How Easy Or Difficult It Is For Us To Imagine Ourselves, Under Like Circumstances, Making A Similar Mistake.

The Dream Of The News Is That It Makes Us Care About Other People And Situations. But We Cannot Identify With People To Whom We Haven't Been Introduced. Humans Will Only Respond To Art, To People Who Are Skilled In Making You Care.

Gaffe-focused Journalism: Revenge Of Intelligent People Who Know True Evils Are Out There But Lack The Access/time To Get To Them.

Though Debts Are Condemned In The Financial World, The World Of Friendship And Love May Perversely Depend On Well-managed Debts.

Love And Friendship

We Depend On Our Surroundings Obliquely To Embody The Moods And Ideas We Respect And Then To Remind Us Of Them. We Look To Our Buildings To Hold Us, Like A Kind Of Psychological Mould, To A Helpful Vision Of Ourselves. We Arrange Around Us Material Forms Which Communicate To Us What We Need — But Are At Constant Risk Of Forgetting What We Need — Within. We Turn To Wallpaper, Benches, Paintings And Streets To Staunch The Disappearance Of Our True Selves.

Journeys Are The Midwives Of Thought. Few Places Are More Conducive To Internal Conversations Than A Moving Plane, Ship Or Train. There Is An Almost Quaint Correlation Between What Is In Front Of Our Eyes And The Thoughts We Are Able To Have In Our Heads: Large Thoughts At Times Requiring Large Views, New Thoughts New Places. Introspective Reflections Which Are Liable To Stall Are Helped Along By The Flow Of The Landscape. The Mind May Be Reluctant To Think Properly When Thinking Is All It Is Supposed To Do.

A Virtuous, Ordinary Life, Striving For Wisdom But Never Far From Folly, Is Achievement Enough.

To One's Enemies: "i Hate Myself More Than You Ever Could.

The Only Way To Be Happy Is To Realise How Much Depends On How You Look At Things

An Understandable Hunger For Potential Clients Tempts Many [career Counseling Therapists] To Overpromise, Like Creative Writing Teachers Who, Out Of Greed Or Sentimentality, Sometimes Imply That All Of Their Students Could One Day Produce Worthwhile Literature, Rather Than Frankly Acknowledging The Troubling Truth, Anathema To A Democratic Society, That The Great Writer, Like The Contented Worker, Remains An Erratic And Anomalous Event, Immune To The Methods Of Factory Farming.

Reputation Matters So Much Only Because People So Seldom Think For Themselves.

Much Of The Really Serious Trouble In The World Gets Going With A Sense Of Humiliation.

The Genius Of Religions Is That They Structure The Inner Life.

The Price We Have Paid For Expecting To Be So Much More Than Our Ancestors Is A Perpetual Anxiety That We Are Far From Being All We Might Be.

We Keep A Special Place In Our Hearts For People Who Refuse To Be Impressed By Us.

People Who Readily Accept The Need For A Gym Will Resist That Their Personalities Might Need Some Work Too.

Not Everyone Is Worth Listening To.

The Largest Part Of What We Call 'personality' Is Determined By How We've Opted To Defend Ourselves Against Anxiety And Sadness".

What I Want To Argue For Is Not That We Should Give Up On Our Ideas Of Success, But That We Should Make Sure That They Are Our Own. We Should Focus In On Our Ideas And Make Sure That We Own Them, That We're Truly The Authors Of Our Own Ambitions. Because It's Bad Enough Not Getting What You Want, But It's Even Worse To Have An Idea Of What It Is You Want And Find Out At The End Of The Journey That It Isn't, In Fact, What You Wanted All Along.

A Simple Problem Of Arithmetic: There Are Far More Ambitions Than There Are Grand Destinies Available.

We Are Certainly Influenced By Role Models, And If We Are Surrounded By Images Of Beautiful Rich People, We Will Start To Think That To Be Beautiful And Rich Is Very Important - Just As In The Middle Ages, People Were Surrounded By Images Of Religious Piety.

Let Death Find Us As We Are Building Up Our Matchstick Protests Against Its Waves.

Intuition Is Unconscious Accumulated Experience Informing Judgement In Real Time.

It Seems, In Fact, That The More Advanced A Society Is, The Greater Will Be Its Interest In Ruined Things, For It Will See In Them A Redemptively Sobering Reminder Of The Fragility Of Its Own Achievements. Ruins Pose A Direct Challenge To Our Concern With Power And Rank, With Bustle And Fame. They Puncture The Inflated Folly Of Our Exhaustive And Frenetic Pursuit Of Wealth.

We May Seek A Fortune For No Greater Reason Than To Secure The Respect And Attention Of People Who Would Otherwise Look Straight Through Us.

Good Sex Isn't Just Fun, It Keeps Us Sane And Happy. Having Sex With Someone Makes Us Feel Wanted, Alive And Potent.

It Is No Coincidence That The Western Attraction To Sublime Landscapes Developed At Precisely The Moment When Traditional Beliefs In God Began To Wane.

The Most Unbearable Thing About Many Successful People Is Not - As We Flatteringly Think - How Lazy They Are, But How Hard They Work.

Distress At Losing An Object Can Be As Much A Frustration At The Intellectual Mystery Of The Disappearance As About The Loss Itself.

In Their Different Ways, Art And Philosophy Help Us, In Schopenhauer's Words, To Turn Pain Into Knowledge.

It Is Striking How Much More Seriously We Are Likely To Be Taken After We Have Been Dead A Few Centuries.

Everyone Wants A Better Life: Very Few Of Us Want To Be Better People.

The Good Parent: Someone Who Doesn't Mind, For A Time, Being Hated By Their Children.

There Are Things That Are Not Spoken About In Polite Society. Very Quickly In Most Conversations You'll Reach A Moment Where Someone Goes, 'oh, That's A Bit Heavy,' Or 'eew, Disgusting.' And Literature Is A Place Where That Stuff Goes; Where People Whisper To Each Other Across Books, The Writer To The Reader. I Think That Stops You Feeling Lonely – In The Deeper Sense, Lonely.

He Was A Volatile Mixture Of Confidence And Vulnerability. He Could Deliver Extended Monologues On Professional Matters, Then Promptly Stop In His Tracks To Peer Inquisitively Into His Guest's Eyes For Signs Of Boredom Or Mockery, Being Intelligent Enough To Be Unable Fully To Believe In His Own Claims To Significance. He Might, In A Past Life, Have Been A Particularly Canny And Sharp-tongued Royal Advisor.

We Don't Exist Unless There Is Someone Who Can See Us Existing, What We Say Has No Meaning Until Someone Can Understand, While To Be Surrounded By Friends Is Constantly To Have Our Identity Confirmed; Their Knowledge And Care For Us Have The Power To Pull Us From Our Numbness. In Small Comments, Many Of Them Teasing, They Reveal They Know Our Foibles And Except Them And So, In Turn, Accept That We Have A Place In The World.

We Used To Build Temples, And Museums Are About As Close As Secular Society Dares To Go In Facing Up To The Idea That A Good Building Can Change Your Life (and A Bad One Ruin It).

Secular Society

Unhappiness Can Stem From Having Only One Perspective To Play With.

The Architects Who Benefit Us Most Maybe Those Generous Enough To Lay Aside Their Claims To Genius In Order To Devote Themselves To Assembling Graceful But Predominantly Unoriginal Boxes. Architecture Should Have The Confidence And The Kindness To Be A Little Boring.

Only As We Mature Does Affection Begin To Depend On Achievement.

Alcohol-inspired Fights Are A Reminder Of The Price We Pay For Our Daily Submission At The Altars Of Prudence And Order.

I Learnt To Stop Fantasising About The Perfect Job Or The Perfect Relationship Because That Can Actually Be An Excuse For Not Living.

Arguments Are Like Eels: However Logical, They May Slip From The Minds Weak Grasp Unless Fixed There By Imagery And Style.

I Am In General A Very Pessimistic Person With An Optimistic, Day To Day Take On Things. The Bare Facts Of Life Are Utterly Terrifying. And Yet, One Can Laugh. Indeed, One Has To Laugh Precisely Because Of The Darkness: The Nervous Laughter Of The Trenches.

In A Secularising World, Art Has Replaced Religion As A Touchstone Of Our Reverence And Devotion.

What We Call A Home Is Merely Any Place That Succeeds In Making More Consistenly Available To Us The Important Truths Which The Wider World Ignores, Or Which Our Distracted And Irresolute Selves Have Trouble Holding Onto." (p123) Architecture Of Happiness

Life Seems To Be A Process Of Replacing One Anxiety With Another And Substituting One Desire For Another--which Is Not To Say That We Should Never Strive To Overcome Any Of Our Anxieties Or Fulfil Any Of Our Desires, But Rather To Suggest That We Should Perhaps Build Into Our Strivings An Awareness Of The Way Our Goals Promise Us A Respite And A Resolution That They Cannot, By Definition, Deliver.

You Have To Be Quite Heavily Invested In Someone To Do Them The Honour Of Telling Them You're Annoyed With Them.

Serious Journalists Often Imagine Society Is Adrift Because People Don't Know Certain Things. Yet Often, They Know But Just Don't Care. So The Task Of Serious Journalism Isn't Just To Lay Out Truths. It Is To Make Vital Truths Compelling To A Big Audience.

There's A Whole Category Of People Who Miss Out By Not Allowing Themselves To Be Weird Enough.

One Kind Of Good Book Should Leave You Asking: How Did The Author Know That About Me?

Travel Agents Would Be Wiser To Ask Us What We Hope To Change About Our Lives Rather Than Simply Where We Wish To Go.

Socrates, On Being Insulted In The Marketplace, Asked By A Passerby, "don't You Worry About Being Called Names?" Retorted, "why? Do You Think I Should Resent It If An Ass Had Kicked Me?

Someone Who Has Thought Rationally And Deeply About How The Body Works Is Likely To Arrive At Better Ideas About How To Be Healthy Than Someone Who Has Followed A Hunch. Medicine Presupposes A Hierarchy Between The Confusion The Layperson Will Be In About What Is Wrong With Him, And The More Accurate Knowledge Available To Doctors Reasoning Logically. At The Heart Of Epicureanism Is The Thought That We Are As Bad At Answering The Question "what Will Make Me Happy?" As "what Will Make Me Healthy?" Our Souls Do Not Spell Out Their Troubles.

We Each Appear To Hold Within Ourselves A Range Of Divergent Views As To Our Native Qualities.. And Amid Such Uncertainty, We Typically Turn To The Wider World To Settle The Question Of Our Significance.. We Seem Beholden To Affections Of Others To Endure Ourselves.

Many Moments In Religion Seem Attractive To Me Even Though I Can't Believe In Any Of It.

What Am I Supposed To Do Here? What Am I Supposed To Think?

Most Of Our Childhood Is Stored Not In Photos, But In Certain Biscuits, Lights Of Day, Smells, Textures Of Carpet.

Instead Of Bringing Back 1600 Plants, We Might Return From Our Journeys With A Collection Of Small Unfêted But Life-enhancing Thoughts.

Perhaps It Is True That We Do Not Really Exist Until There Is Someone There To See Us Existing, We Cannot Properly Speak Until There Is Someone Who Can Understand What We Are Saying In Essence, We Are Not Wholly Alive Until We Are Loved.

The Lesson? To Respond To The Unexpected And Hurtful Behavior Of Others With Something More Than A Wipe Of The Glasses, To See It As A Chance To Expand Our Understanding.

To Design Means Forcing Ourselves To Unlearn What We Believe We Already Know, Patiently To Take Apart The Mechanisms Behind Our Reflexes And To Acknowledge The Mystery And Stupefying Complexity Of Everyday Gestures Like Switching Off A Light Of Turning On A Tap

Blind Impatience Is Equally Evident In The Fruit Section. Our Ancestors Might Have Delighted In The Occasional Handful Of Berries Found On The Underside Of A Bush In Late Summer, Viewing It As A Sign Of The Unexpected Munificence Of A Divine Creator, But We Became Modern When We Gave Up On Awaiting Sporadic Gifts From Above And Sought To Render Any Pleasing Sensation Immediately And Repeatedly Available.

We Are All More Intelligent Than We Are Capable, And Awareness Of The Insanity Of Love Has Never Saved Anyone From The Disease.

The Only People We Can Think Of As Normal Are Those We Don't Yet Know Very Well.

Most Good Thinking Has Its Origin In Fear.

Rather Than Teasing The Buyers, We May Blame The Society In Which They Lived For Setting Up A Situation Where The Purchase Of Ornate Cabinets Felt Psychologically Necessary And Rewarding, Where Respect Was Dependent On Baroque Displays. Rather Than A Tale Of Greed, The History Of Luxury Could More Accurately Be Read As A Record Of Emotional Trauma. It Is The Legacy Of Those Who Have Felt Pressured By The Disdain Of Others To Add An Extraordinary Amount To Their Bare Selves In Order To Signal That They Too May Lay A Claim To Love.

Philosophy, Art, Politics, Religion And Bohemia Have Never Sought To Do Away Entirely With The Status Hierarchy; They Have Attemptee, Rather, To Institute New Kinds Of Hierarchies Based On Sets Of Values Unrecognised By, And Critical Of, Those Of The Majority.. They Have Provided Us With Persuasive And Consoling Reminders That There Is More Than One Way Of Succeeding In Life.

Despite The Best Efforts Of Critics And The Hopes Of Authors, Our Tastes In Books Are Probably As Inherent & Unbudgeable As Those In Food.

Pick Up Any Newspaper Or Magazine, Open The Tv, And You'll Be Bombarded With Suggestions Of How To Have A Successful Life. Some Of These Suggestions Are Deeply Unhelpful To Our Own Projects And Priorities - And We Should Take Care.

Curiosity Might Be Pictured As Being Made Up Of Chains Of Small Questions Extending Outwards, Sometimes Over Huge Distances, From A Central Hub Composed Of A Few Blunt, Large Questions.

Work Finally Begins When The Fear Of Doing Nothing Exceeds The Fear Of Doing It Badly.

Bad Architecture Is In The End As Much A Failure Of Psychology As Of Design. It Is An Example Expressed Through Materials Of The Same Tendencies Which In Other Domains Will Lead Us To Marry The Wrong People, Choose Inappropriate Jobs And Book Unsuccessful Holidays: The Tendency Not To Understand Who We Are And What Will Satisfy Us.

A World Where A Majority Had Imbibed The Lessons Implicit Within Tragic Art Would Be One In Which The Consequences Of Our Failures Would Necessarily Cease To Weigh Upon Us So Heavily.

The Assumption Is That Life Doesn't Need To Be Navigated With Lessons. You Can Just Do It Intuitively. After All, You Only Need To Achieve Autonomy From Your Parents, Find A Moderately Satisfying Job, Form A Relationship, Perhaps Raise Some Children, Watch The Onset Of Mortality In Your Parents' Generation And Eventually In Your Own, Until One Day A Fatal Illness Starts Gnawing At Your Innards And You Calmly Go To The Grave, Shut The Coffin And Are Done With The Self-evident Business Of Life.

True Love Is A Lack Of Desire To Check One's Smartphone In Another's Presence.

Life Gives Us No Such Handy Markers - A Storm Comes, And Far From This Being A Harbinger Of Death And Collapse, During Its Course A Person Discovers Love And Truth, Beauty And Happiness, The Rain Lashing At The Windows All The While.

Once I Began To Consider Everything As Being Of Potential Interest, Objects Released Latent Layers Of Value.

Everyone Returns Us To A Different Sense Of Ourselves, For We Become A Little Of Who They Think We Are.

I Feel That The Great Challenge Of Our Time Is The Communication Of Ideas.

Only By Declaring A Book Completely Finished Can One Start To See How Much Remains To Be Done On It.

Our Responses To The World Are Crucially Moulded By The Company We Keep, For We Temper Our Curiosity To Fit In With The Expectations Of Others.

Company We Keep

The Company Of Certain People May Excite Our Generosity And Sensitivity, While That Of Others Awakens Our Competitiveness And Envy.

When Proust Urges Us To Evaluate The World Properly, He Repeatedly Reminds Us Of The Value Of Modest Scenes.

I Was Foreign And Jewish, With A Funny Name, And Was Very Small And Hated Sport, A Real Problem At An English Prep School. So The Way To Get Round It Was To Become The School Joker, Which I Did Quite Effectively - I Was Always Fooling Around To Make The People Who Would Otherwise Dump Me In The Loo Laugh.

Taking Architecture Seriously Therefore Makes Some Singular And Strenuous Demands Upon Us...it Means Conceding That We Are Inconveniently Vulnerable To The Colour Of Our Wallpaper And That Our Sense Of Purpose May Be Derailed By An Unfortunate Bedspread

Endeavoring To Purchase Something We Think Beautiful May In Fact Be The Most Unimaginative Way Of Dealing With The Longing It Excites In Us, Just As Trying To Sleep With Someone May Be The Bluntest Response To A Feeling Of Love.

Social Media Has Lots Of Benefits, But Compared To Christianity, It Tends To Group People By Interests. Religion Puts You With People Who Have Nothing In Common Except That You're Human.

The Only Possible Way To Begin A Book Is To Tell Oneself That Its Eventual Failure Is Guaranteed — But Survivable.

A Dominant Impulse On Encountering Beauty Is To Wish To Hold On To It, To Possess It And Give It Weight In One’s Life. There Is An Urge To Say, ‘i Was Here, I Saw This And It Mattered To Me.

It's Perhaps Easier Now Than Ever Before To Make A Good Living; It's Perhaps Harder Than Ever Before To Stay Calm, To Be Free Of Career Anxiety.

Memory Is... Similar To Anticipation: An Instrument Of Simplification And Selection.

We Wanted To Test Each Other's Capacity For Survival: Only If We Had Tried In Vain To Destroy One Another Would We Know We Were Safe.

It Is In Books, Poems, Paintings Which Often Give Us The Confidence To Take Seriously Feelings In Ourselves That We Might Otherwise Never Have Thought To Acknowledge.

If Our Lives Are Dominated By A Search For Happiness, Then Perhaps Few Activities Reveal As Much About The Dynamics Of This Quest - In All Its Ardour And Paradoxes - Than Our Travels.

Must Being In Love Always Mean Being In Pain?

Intimacy Is The Capacity To Be Rather Weird With Someone - And Finding That That's Ok With Them.

The Best Cure For One's Bad Tendencies Is To See Them In Action In Another Person.

The Secular World Is Full Of Holes. We Have Secularized Badly.

We Are Sad At Home And Blame The Weather And The Ugliness Of The Buildings, But On The Tropical Island We Learn That The State Of The Skies And The Appearance Of Our Dwellings Can Never On Their Own Underwrite Our Joy Nor Condemn Us To Misery.

Philosophy Had Supplied Socrates With Convictions In Which He Had Been Able To Have Rational, As Opposed To Hysterical, Confidence When Faced With Disapproval.

It Is The Most Ambitious And Driven Among Us Who Are The Most Sorely In Need Of Having Our Reckless Hopes Dampened Through Immersive Dousings In The Darkness Which Religions Have Explored. This Is A Particular Priority For Secular Americans, Perhaps The Most Anxious And Disappointed People On Earth, For Their Nation Infuses Them With The Most Extreme Hopes About What They May Be Able To Achieve In Their Working Lives And Relationships.

Though It May Feel Otherwise, Enjoying Life Is No More Dangerous Than Apprehending It With Continuous Anxiety And Gloom.

We Study Biology, Physics, Movements Of Glaciers... Where Are The Classes On Envy, Feeling Wronged, Despair, Bitterness.

One Rarely Falls In Love Without Being As Much Attracted To What Is Interestingly Wrong With Someone As What Is Objectively Healthy.

Falling In Love

When I See Someone Like Richard Dawkins, I See My Father. I Grew Up With That. I'm Basically The Child Of Richard Dawkins.

Our Minds Are Susceptible To The Influence Of External Voices Telling Us What We Require To Be Satisfied, Voices That May Drown Out The Faint Sounds Emitted By Our Souls And Distract Us From The Careful, Arduous Task Of Accurately Naming Our Priorities.

As An Atheist, I Think There Are Lots Of Things Religions Get Up To Which Are Of Value To Non-believers - And One Of Those Things Is Trying To Be A Bit Better Than We Normally Manage To Be.

Writing Isn’t A Career Choice. It’s Self-medication That Over Time Precipitates The Madness It Was Meant To Ward Off.

What Should Worry Us Is Not The Number Of People That Oppose Us, But How Good Their Reasons Are For Doing So.

The Challenge Of Modern Relationships: How To Prove More Interesting Than The Other's Smartphone.

Man Seems Merely Dust Postponed: The Sublime As An Encounter - Pleasurable, Intoxicating, Even - With Human Weakness In The Face Of Strength, Age And Size Of The Universe.

True Respectability Stems Not From The Will Of The Majority But From Proper Reasoning.

It Was No Longer Her Absence That Wounded Me, But My Growing Indifference To It. Forgetting, However Calming, Was Also A Reminder Of Infidelity To What I Had At One Time Held So Dear.

The Inability To Live In The Present Lies In The Fear Of Leaving The Sheltered Position Of Anticipation Or Memory, And So Of Admitting That This Is The Only Life That One Is Ever Likely (heavenly Intervention Aside) To Live.

Most Anger Stems From Feelings Of Weakness, Sadness And Fear: Hard To Remember When One Is At The Receiving End Of Its Defiant Roar.

Every Time We Feel Satisfied With What We Have, We Can Be Counted As Rich, However Little We May Actually Possess.

We Tend To Believe In The Modern Secular World That If You Tell Someone Something Once, They'll Remember It. ... Religions Go, "nonsense. You Need To Keep Repeating The Lesson 10 Times A Day. So Get On Your Knees And Repeat It." That's What All Religions Tell Us: "get On Your Knees And Repeat It 10 Or 20 Or 15 Times A Day." Otherwise Our Minds Are Like Sieves.

In The Works Of Lucretius, We Find Two Reasons Why We Shouldn't Worry About Death. If You Have Had A Successful Life, Lucretius Tell Us, There's No Reason To Mind Its End. And, If You Haven't Had A Good Time, "why Do You Seek To Add More Years, Which Would Also Pass But Ill?"

People Who Hold Important Positions In Society Are Commonly Labelled "somebodies," And Their Inverse "nobodies"-both Of Which Are, Of Course, Nonsensical Descriptors, For We Are All, By Necessity, Individuals With Distinct Identities And Comparable Claims On Existence. Such Words Are Nevertheless An Apt Vehicle For Conveying The Disparate Treatment Accorded To Different Groups. Those Without Status Are All But Invisible: They Are Treated Brusquely By Others, Their Complexities Trampled Upon And Their Singularities Ignored.

Forcing People To Eat Together Is An Effective Way To Promote Tolerance.

People Only Get Really Interesting When They Start To Rattle The Bars Of Their Cages.

It's Very Hard To Respect People On Holiday - Everybody Looks So Silly At The Beach, It Makes You Hate Humanity - But When You See People At Their Work They Elicit Respect, Whether It's A Mechanic, A Stonemason Or An Accountant.

There Is A Longing For A Return To A Time Without The Need For Choices, Free Of The Regret At The Inevitable Loss That All Choice (however Wonderful) Has Entailed.

Our Homes Do Not Have To Offer Us Permanent Occupancy Or Store Our Clothes To Merit The Name. To Speak Of Home In Relation To A Building Is Simply To Recognise Its Harmony With Our Own Prized Internal Song. Home Can Be An Airport Or A Library, A Garden Or A Motorway Diner.

Dreams Reveal We Never Quite Get 'over' Anything: It's All Still In There Somewhere.

Rather Than Employing It As A Supplement To Active, Conscious Seeing, They Used The Medium As A Substitute, Paying Less Attention To The World Than They Had Done Previously, Taking It On Faith That Photography Automatically Assured Them Possession Of It.

Work Is Most Fulfilling When You're At The Comfortable, Exciting Edge Of Not Quite Knowing What You Are Doing.

In Reality, The Likelihood Of Reaching The Pinnacle Of Capitalist Society Today Is Only Marginally Better Than Were The Chances Of Being Accepted Into The French Nobility Four Centuries Ago, Though At Least An Aristocratic Age Was Franker, And Therefore Kinder, About The Odds. It Did Not Relentlessly Play Up The Possibilities Open To All, And So, In Turn, Did Not Cruelly Equate An Ordinary Life With A Failed One.

Anxiety Is The Handmaiden Of Contemporary Ambition.

Our Greatest Furies Spring From Events Which Violate Our Sense Of The Ground Of Our Existence.

Our Bodies Hold Our Minds Hostage To Their Whims And Rhythms.

We Fall In Love Because We Long To Escape From Ourselves With Someone As Beautiful, Intelligent, And Witty As We Are Ugly, Stupid, And Dull. But What If Such A Perfect Being Should One Day Turn Around And Decide They Will Love Us Back? We Can Only Be Somewhat Shocked-how Can They Be As Wonderful As We Had Hoped When They Have The Bad Taste To Approve Of Someone Like Us?

Falling In Love

It Looks Like It’s Wasting Time, But Literature Is Actually The Ultimate Time-saver - Because It Gives Us Access To A Range Of Emotions And Events That It Would Take You Years, Decades, Millennia To Try To Experience Directly. Literature Is The Greatest Reality Simulator - A Machine That Puts You Through Infinitely More Situations Than You Can Ever Directly Witness.

Responsible For Wrapping The Iron Fist Of Authority In Its Velvet Glove Is Jane Axtell, Head Of The Accountancy Firm's Human Resources Department.

The Origins And Travels Of Our Purchases Remain Matters Of Indifference, Although To The More Imaginative At Least A Slight Dampness At The Bottom Of A Carton, Or An Obscure Code Printed Along A Computer Cable, May Hint At Processes Of Manufacture And Transport Nobler And More Mysterious, More Worthy Of Wonder And Study, Than The Very Goods Themselves.

These Inventors Were Elevating The Formulation Of Entrepreneurial Ideas To The Status Of A Visionary Activity. Though Forced To Justify Their Efforts In The Pragmatic Language Of Venture Capital, They Were At Heart Utopian Thinkers Intent On Transforming The World.

A 'good Job' Can Be Both Practically Attractive While Still Not Good Enough To Devote Your Entire Life To.

Not Good Enough

We Are Presented With An Unpleasant Choice Between Either Committing To Peculiar Concepts About Immaterial Deities Or Letting Go Entirely Of A Host Of Consoling, Subtle Or Just Charming Rituals For Which We Struggle To Find Equivalents In Secular Society.

Secular Society

Newspapers Are Being Read All Around. The Point Is Not, Of Course, To Glean New Information, But Rather To Coax The Mind Out Of Its Sleep-induced Introspective Temper.

Being Incomprehensible Offers Unparalleled Protection Against Having Nothing To Say...but Writing With Simplicity Requires Courage, For There Is A Danger That One Will Be Overlooked, Dismissed As Simpleminded By Those With A Tenacious Belief That The Impassable Prose Is A Hallmark Of Intelligence.

The Media Insists On Taking What Someone Didn't Mean To Say As Being Far Closer To The Truth Than What They Did.

How Do The Stems Connect To The Roots?' 'where Is The Mist Coming From?' 'why Does One Tree Seem Darker Than Another?' These Questions Are Implicitly Asked And Answered In The Process Of Sketching.

Wealth Is Not An Absolute. It Is Relative To Desire. Every Time We Yearn For Something We Cannot Afford, We Grow Poorer, Whatever Our Resources. And Every Time We Feel Satisfied With What We Have, We Can Be Counted As Rich, However Little We May Actually Possess.

Every Realistic Picture Represents A Choice As To Which Features Of Reality Should Be Given Prominence; No Painting Ever Captures The Whole.

The Activities Of Drawing, Eating And Drinking, All Involve Assimilations By The Self Of Desirable Elements From The World, A Transfer Of Goodness From Without To Within.

He Was Marked Out By His Relentless Ability To Find Fault With Others' Mediocrity - Suggesting That A Certain Type Of Intelligence May Be At Heart Nothing More Or Less Than A Superior Capacity For Dissatisfaction.

We Need A Home In The Psychological Sense As Much As We Need One In The Physical: To Compensate For A Vulnerability. We Need A Refuge To Shore Up Our States Of Mind, Because So Much Of The World Is Opposed To Our Allegiances. We Need Our Rooms To Align Us To Desirable Versions Of Ourselves And To Keep Alive The Important, Evanescent Sides Of Us.

We Accept The Need To Train Extensively To Fly A Plane; But Think Instinct Should Be Enough For Marrying And Raising Kids.

The Pleasure We Derive From Journeys Is Perhaps Dependent More On The Mindset With Which We Travel Than On The Destination We Travel To.

To Be Loved By Someone Is To Realize How Much They Share The Same Needs That Lie At The Heart Of Our Own Attraction To Them. Albert Camus Suggested That We Fall In Love With People Because, From The Outside, They Look So Whole, Physically Whole And Emotionally 'together' - When Subjectively We Feel Dispersed And Confused. We Would Not Love If There Were No Lack Within Us, But We Are Offended By The Discovery Of A Similar Lack In The Other. Expecting To Find The Answer, We Find Only The Duplicate Of Our Own Problem.

Falling In Love

[t]he Unsympathetic Assessments We Make Of Others Are Usually The Result Of Nothing More Sinister Than Our Habit Of Looking At Them In The Wrong Way, Through Lenses Clouded By Distraction, Exhaustion And Fear, Which Blind Us To The Fact That They Are Really, Despite A Thousand Differences, Just Altered Versions Of Ourselves: Fellow Fragile, Uncertain, Flawed Beings Likewise Craving Love And In Urgent Need Of Forgiveness.

The Greatest Difficulty Of Travel Is That One Is Forced To Take Oneself Along.

That Said, Deciding To Avoid Other People Does Not Necessarily Equate With Having No Desire Whatsoever For Company; It May Simply Reflect A Dissatisfaction With What—or Who—is Available. Cynics Are, In The End, Only Idealists With Awkwardly High Standards. In Chamfort's Words, 'it Is Sometimes Said Of A Man Who Lives Alone That He Does Not Like Society. This Is Like Saying Of A Man That He Does Not Like Going For Walks Because He Is Not Fond Of Walking At Night In The Forêt De Bondy.

A Successful Work Will Draw Out The Features Capable Of Exciting A Sense Of Beauty And Interest In The Spectator.

One Of The Best Protections Against Disappointment Is To Have A Lot Going On.

It Is Not Necessarily At Home That We Best Encounter Our True Selves. The Furniture Insists That We Cannot Change Because It Does Not; The Domestic Setting Keeps Us Tethered To The Person We Are In Ordinary Life, Who May Not Be Who We Essentially Are.

I Was Uncomfortable Writing Fiction. My Love Was The Personal Essay Rather Than The Novel.

Maturity: The Confidence To Have No Opinions On Many Things.

The Problem Isn't So Much Finding Good Ideas (there Is No Shortage) As Embedding The Ones We Have Into Everyday Practice.

I'm Also Interested In The Modern Suggestion That You Can Have A Combination Of Love And Sex In A Marriage - Which No Previous Society Has Ever Believed.

We Are Tempted To Believe That Certain Achievements And Possessions Will Give Us Enduring Satisfaction. We Are Invited To Imagine Ourselves Scaling The Steep Cliff Face Of Happiness In Order To Reach A Wide, High Plateau On Which We Will Live Out The Rest Of Our Lives; We Are Not Reminded That Soon After Gaining The Summit, We Will Be Called Down Again Into Fresh Lowlands Of Anxiety And Desire.

Perhaps The Easiest People To Fall In Love With Are Those About Whom We Know Nothing. Romances Are Never As Pure As Those We Imagine During Long Train Journeys, As We Secretly Contemplate A Beautiful Person Who Is Gazing Out Of The Window – A Perfect Love Story Interrupted Only When The Beloved Looks Back Into The Carriage And Starts Up A Dull Conversation About The Excessive Price Of The On-board Sandwiches With A Neighbour Or Blows Her Nose Aggressively Into A Handkerchief.

Falling In Love

My Writing Always Came Out Of A Very Personal Place, Out Of An Attempt To Stay Sane.

If The Behaviour Of Babies And Small Children Is Any Guide, We Emerge Into The World With Our Tendencies To Imbalance Already Well Entrenched. In Our Playpens And High Chairs, We Are Rarely Far From Displaying Either Hysterical Happiness Or Savage Disappointment, Love Or Rage, Mania Or Exhaustion--and, Despite The Growth Of A More Temperate Exterior In Adulthood, We Seldom Succeed In Laying Claim To Lasting Equilibrium, Traversing Our Lives Like Stubbornly Listing Ships On Choppy Seas.

All Tours Are Filled With Humiliation. My Publisher Once Hired A Private Jet To Fly Me To A Venue Where 1,000 People Were Waiting. It Almost Bankrupted Him.

Despite Its Maddeningly Vague, Inarticulate Form, Anxiety Is Almost Always Trying To Tell You Something Useful And Apposite.

The Mind May Be Reluctant To Think Properly When Thinking Is All It Is Supposed To Do; The Task Can Be As Paralysing As Having To Tell A Joke Or Mimic An Accent On Demand.

Most Of What Makes A Book 'good' Is That We Are Reading It At The Right Moment For Us.

The Telephone Becomes An Instrument Of Torture In The Demonic Hands Of A Beloved Who Doesn't Call.

Our Disrespect For Thinking: Someone Sitting In A Chair, Gazing Out Of A Window Blankly, Always Described As 'doing Nothing'.

You Need A Long Hard Day's Work To Reveal The Logic Of The Craving For Very Bad Tv And Alcohol.

Status Anxiety Definitely Exists At A Political Level. Many Iraqis Were Annoyed With The Us Essentially For Reasons Of Status: For Not Showing Them Respect, For Humiliating Them.

According To Montaigne, It Was The Oppressive Notion That We Had Complete Mental Control Over Our Bodies, And The Horror Of Departing From This Portrait Of Normality, That Had Left The Man Unable To Perform Sexually.

Religions Are So Subtle, So Complicated, So Intelligent In Many Ways That They're Not Fit To Be Abandoned To The Religious Alone; They're For All Of Us.

Year-end Financial Statements Express A Truth About Office Life Which Is No Less Irrefutable Yet Also, In The End, No Less Irrelevant Or Irritating Than An Evolutionary Biologist's Proud Reminder That The Purpose Of Existence Lies In The Propagation Of Our Genes.

The Arrogance That Says Analysing The Relationship Between Reasons And Causes Is More Important Than Writing A Philosophy Of Shyness Or Sadness Or Friendship Drives Me Nuts. I Can't Accept That.

It Is Perhaps Sad Books That Best Console Us When We Are Sad.

Not Being Understood May Be Taken As A Sign That There Is Much In One To Understand.

Never Too Late To Learn Some Embarrassingly Basic, Stupidly Obvious Things About Oneself.

I Think People Want To Get Married To End Their Emotional Uncertainty. In A Way, They Want To End Powerful Feelings, Or Certainly The Negative Ones.

We Should Keep A Careful Diary Of Our Moments Of Envy: They Are Our Covert Guides To What We Should Try To Do Next.

What Is Fascinating About Marriage Is Why Anyone Wants To Get Married.

I Never Wavered In My Certainty That God Did Not Exist. I Was Simply Liberated By The Thought That There Might Be A Way To Engage With Religion Without Having To Subscribe To Its Supernatural Content - A Way, To Put It In More Abstract Terms, To Think About Fathers Without Upsetting My Respectful Memory Of My Own Father. I Recognized That My Continuing Resistance To Theories Of An Afterlife Or Of Heavenly Residents Was No Justification For Giving Up On The Music, Buildings, Prayers, Rituals, Feasts, Shrines, Pilgrimages, Communal Meals And Illustrated Manuscripts Of The Faiths.

We Read The Weird Tales In Newspapers To Crowd Out The Even Weirder Stuff Inside Us.

Paying Tax Should Be Framed As A Glorious Civic Duty Worthy Of Gratitude - Not A Punishment For Making Money.

One Of The Unexpectedly Important Things That Art Can Do For Us Is To Teach Us How To Suffer More Successfully.

It's As Though Either You Accept [religious] Doctrine And Then You Can Have All The Nice Stuff, Or You Reject The Doctrine And You're Living In Some Kind Of Spiritual Wasteland Under The Guidance Of Cnn And Walmart.

The Materialistic View Of Happiness Of Our Age Starkly Revealed In Our Understanding Of The Word "luxury.

I Am Conscious Of Trying To Stretch The Boundaries Of Non-fiction Writing. It's Always Surprised Me How Little Attention Many Non-fiction Writers Pay To The Formal Aspects Of Their Work.

Taking Photographs Can Assuage The Itch For Possession Sparked By The Beauty Of A Place; Our Anxiety Over Losing A Precious Scene Can Decline With Every Click Of The Shutter.

To Look At The Paper Is To Raise A Seashell To One's Ear And To Be Overwhelmed By The Roar Of Humanity.

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