Chad Comello

Tag: quotes

  • For the records

    Dan Cohen ponders why some recent sci-fi films prominently feature libraries, archives, and museums:

    Ever since Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor extracted the Death Star plans from a digital repository on the planet Scarif in Rogue One, libraries, archives, and museums have played an important role in tentpole science fiction films. From Luke Skywalker’s library of Jedi wisdom books in The Last Jedi, to Blade Runner 2049’s multiple storage media for DNA sequences, to a fateful scene in an ethnographic museum in Black Panther, the imposing and evocative halls of cultural heritage organizations have been in the foreground of the imagined future. …

    … At the same time that these movies portray an imagined future, they are also exploring our current anxiety about the past and how it is stored; how we simultaneously wish to leave the past behind, and how it may also be impossible to shake it. They indicate that we live in an age that has an extremely strained relationship with history itself. These films are processing that anxiety on Hollywood’s big screen at a time when our small screens, social media, and browser histories document and preserve so much of we do and say.

    Ready Player One is another recent example. And let’s give some love to the historical society in Back to the Future Part III. Read the rest here.

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  • Man’s Search for Responsibility

    Finally got around to reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. In one part he talks about a hypothetical “Statue of Responsibility”:

    Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

    Clever, I thought when I read it. But when I was researching Frankl after reading the book, I learned the Statue of Responsibility is (becoming) a real thing.

    I like how it flips Liberty’s arm motif. There isn’t a permanent site for it yet, but I hope it comes together.

    Some other quotes from the book I enjoyed:

    • “For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.”
    • “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.”
    • “Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”
    • Prisoners looking at sunset: “How beautiful the world could be.”
    • “Self-actualization is possible only possible as a side effect of self-transcendence.”
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  • Mark Twain on the ‘glory-beaming banjo’

    Courtesy of the Steve Martin-narrated documentary Give Me The Banjo about “America’s Instrument”, here’s Mark Twain on the banjo:

    The piano may do for love-sick girls who lace themselves to skeletons, and lunch on chalk, pickles and slate pencils. But give me the banjo. … When you want genuine music—music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth’s pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose,—when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!

    Also by Twain:

    A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the banjo and doesn’t.

    There’s a reason Mark Twain is quoted so often; it’s because he’s so damn quotable.

    Since getting a banjo for my birthday I’ve been on the lookout for banjo-related movies and such. I watched Bela Fleck’s documentary How to Write a Banjo Concerto, and then just this week discovered Give Me The Banjo at my library. What else is good?

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  • Potent quotes noted in 2017

    A few years ago I started logging the interesting or inspiring quotes I come upon in my reading and watching. I thought it would be fun to post the ones I captured in 2017, which taken together tell part of the ongoing story going on in my head and heart. What story do they tell, I wonder:

    “Learning weighs nothing. Lessons you can carry with you.” – Rachel Seiffert, A Boy in Winter

    “Read more than you write, live more than you read.” – Junot Diaz

    “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” – Mary Oliver

    “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” – attributed to Dwight Eisenhower

    “All wisdom ends in paradox.” – Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

    “The blessing is outside of your comfort zone.” – Running store guy, via Ashley Hicks

    “Knowing that we have to die, we ought to live to be prepared to die well, and then, let death come when it may.” – Andrew Jackson

    “It is preferable to take people as they are, rather than as they really are.” – Lord Chesterfield

    “To look for something beautiful is its own reward. A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” – The Lost City of Z

    “Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.” – Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

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  • Studs Terkel’s ‘Working’

    I picked up a copy of Studs Terkels’ Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, a sort of oral history of life and work in and around 1970s Chicago. I’ve kept it on my nightstand and slowly chipped away at it when I was between other books. It’s quite long and I’m not even halfway through, but it has some interesting pull quotes from a variety of subjects, like:

    A copy chief at an ad agency:

    “We’re all vice presidents,” laughs the copy chief. “Clients like to deal with vice presidents. Also, it’s a cheap thing to give somebody. Vice presidents get fired with great energy and alacrity.” …

    “You become what you behold.”

    A steelworker:

    “Everybody should have something to point to.” …

    “Automation? Depends on how it’s applied. It frightens me if it puts me out on the street. It doesn’t frighten me if it shortens my work week.” …

    “You can be a fanatic if you had the time. The whole thing is time. That is, I think, one reason rich kids tend to be fanatic about politics: they have time. Time, that’s the important thing.”

    And Terkel:

    The science of medicine has increased our life expectancy; the science of the business frowns upon the elderly. …

    It is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying. Perhaps immortality, too, is part of the quest. To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book.

    These are not yet automata.

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  • True These

    “What is truth?” — Pontius Pilate

    “Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.” — Thomas Jefferson

    “Truth is Dif­fi­cult. Dif­fi­cult to at­tain, and dif­fi­cult to de­liver. Truth is dif­fi­cult to attain because the world is com­pli­cat­ed; the further you go, the weirder it gets. Un­will­ful untruth is just ig­no­rance and is to be overcome, like a river in one’s path or a sore muscle. Willful untruth is the telling of lies; it should be fought with passion and without mercy, ripped flesh from bones and left to rot in the cold light of day.” — Tim Bray

    “All wisdom ends in paradox.” — Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

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  • Winter was always winter

    Edwin Way Teale, Wandering Through Winter:

    Winter is a time of superlative life. Frosty air sets our blood to racing. The nip of the wind quickens our step. Creatures abroad at this season of the year live intensely, stimulated by cold, using all their powers, all their capacities, to survive. Gone is the languor of August heat waves. Winter provides the testing months, the time of fortitude and courage. For innumerable seeds and insect eggs, this period of cold is essential to sprouting or hatching. For trees, winter is a time of rest. It is also a season of hope. The days are lengthening. The sun is returning. The whole year is beginning. All nature, with bud and seed and egg, looks forward with optimism.

    Alone among the seasons, winter extends across the boundary line into two calendars. It is the double season. We meet it twice in each twelve months. It embraces the end and the beginning of the year. It includes the great holiday times of Christmas and New Year’s. Alone among the seasons it retains its original Anglo-Saxon spelling. Spring began as springen, literally “to spring” as the grass springs up; summer as sumer; and fall as feallan, referring to the falling leaves. But winter was always winter.

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  • So Far Advanced

    Here’s a funny bit in an otherwise unfunny but fascinating book called A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940. After Finland refused Stalin’s ultimatum, Russia initiated war and installed a puppet Finnish government that signed the “treaty” Stalin had wanted:

    The body of the treaty went on cheerfully to grant Stalin every concession he had ever asked of the Finns, with some additional items thrown in for good measure. In return, the whole Finnish land mass was magically rejoined with Soviet Karelia to form “The People’s Republic of Finland.” Broadcasts were soon made in the name of this new government, telling the captive proletariat of “plutocratic Finland” about all the wonderful reforms that would be promulgated after the Red Army had finished liberating them. Kuusinen promised that he would break up all the great landowners’ estates; he also promised the workers an eight-hour day. The workers were not impressed. The eight-hour day had been legislated in Finland twenty-five years earlier, and the government’s land reform program was so far advanced by 1939 that there were only a few hundred estates left in all Finland that measured more than 300 acres. Kuusinen had certainly kept up with things.

    Never change, Finland.

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  • The Ballad Of X

    Francis Spufford, Unapologetic:

    “It would be nice if people were to understand that science is a special exercise in perceiving the world without metaphor, and that, powerful though it is, it doesn’t function as a guide to those very large aspects of experience that can’t be perceived except through metaphor.”

    Wendell Berry, Life Is A Miracle:

    “If modern science is a religion, then one of its presiding deities must be Sherlock Holmes. To the modern scientist as to the great detective, every mystery is a problem, and every problem can be solved. A mystery can exist only because of human ignorance, and human ignorance is always remediable. The appropriate response is not deference or respect, let alone reverence, but pursuit of ‘the answer.’ This pursuit, however, is properly scientific only so long as the mystery is empirically or rationally solvable. When a scientist denies or belittles a mystery that cannot be solved, then he or she is no longer within the bounds of science.”

    N.D. Wilson, Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl:

    “My father uses a blue highlighter to remind him of the good bits he reads, but it has trouble sticking to sunsets or thunderstorms or the cries of the meadowlark in the spring. His guitar is more helpful.”

    Sometimes, solving for x requires writing a song.

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  • Now Is The Time

    I’d like to thank two like-minded quotes for not leaving my conscience alone. I’m not thankful in the happy Thanksgiving sense—more like how someone keeps fighting an argument, if only with himself, though he already knows he’s toast. Fine, I give in, but I’m not happy about it.

    The first is from John Wesley’s “Sermon 50” on the use of money:

    That wherein you are placed, if you follow it in earnest, will leave you no leisure for silly, unprofitable diversions. You have always something better to do, something that will profit you, more or less. And “whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” Do it as soon as possible: No delay! No putting off from day to day, or from hour to hour! Never leave anything till to-morrow, which you can do to-day. And do it as well as possible. Do not sleep or yawn over it: Put your whole strength to the work. Spare no pains. Let nothing be done by halves, or in a slight and careless manner. Let nothing in your business be left undone if it can be done by labour or patience.

    The second is from The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis:

    Do not lose heart, then, my brother, in pursuing your spiritual life. There is yet time, and your hour is not past. Why delay your purpose? Arise! Begin at once and say: “Now is the time to act, now is the time to fight, now is the proper time to amend.” When you are troubled and afflicted, that is the time to gain merit. You must pass through water and fire before coming to rest.

    These dudes must have had some intense New Year’s resolutions.

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  • ‘Let me die trying something new’

    My cousin recently posted a quote from my Uncle Steve, who died of cancer in 2001. He was writing to a friend with whom it appears he was discussing the future and the stress of the unknown:

    Admittedly, not knowing the outcome of my plans can create stress. It takes a great deal of courage to grab the reigns of life and ride off into the wilderness, to live in the chaos of the uncertain. But I would rather live in the stress of uncharted seas in the cause of exploring and living, than in the tepid, stale waters of the charted, programmed life. Let me die trying something new. None of my choices are ever wasted.

    Wise and encouraging words. I knew Steve only in a limited way since he lived farther away and I was only 14 when he died. I wish I’d known him as an adult.

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