Kindle Highlights: July, 2022

Another month, another collection of uncatagorized quotes and excerpts, including unattributed selections from Instapaper. As always, these are more for my own reference than public consumption.

Invisible cities (Calvino, Italo)

  • Your Highlight on page 28 | location 423-425 | Added on Friday, 1 July 2022 23:36:05

In this sense, nothing said of Aglaura is true, and yet these accounts create a solid and compact image of a city, whereas the haphazard opinions which might be inferred from living there have less substance. This is the result: the city that they speak of has much of what is needed to exist, whereas the city that exists on its site, exists less.

Tao Te Ching (Laozi)

  • Your Highlight on page 75 | location 1137-1139 | Added on Sunday, 10 July 2022 22:40:00

(The master of it) anticipates things that are difficult while they are easy, and does things that would become great while they are small. All difficult things in the world are sure to arise from a previous state in which they were easy, and all great things from one in which they were small. Therefore the sage, while he never does what is great, is able on that account to accomplish the greatest things.

Instapaper: Monday, Jul. 11th (Instapaper)

  • Your Highlight at location 263-265 | Added on Wednesday, 13 July 2022 22:56:06

And of course, my work as a poet and philosopher has matured into working with what I call the conversational nature of reality, which is the fact that we don’t get to choose, so often, between things we hope we can choose between.

Instapaper: Monday, Jul. 11th (Instapaper)

  • Your Highlight at location 287-289 | Added on Wednesday, 13 July 2022 22:58:44

I began to realize that my identity depended, not upon any beliefs I had, inherited beliefs or manufactured beliefs, but my identity actually depended on how much attention I was paying to things that were other than myself, and that as you deepen this intentionality and this attention, you started to broaden and deepen your own sense of presence.

Instapaper: Thursday, Jul. 14th (Instapaper)

  • Your Highlight at location 204-206 | Added on Friday, 15 July 2022 20:35:11

Now quantum physics has revealed that we’ve misunderstood imaginary numbers all along. They may have, for a time, seemed to be just a mental device inhabiting the minds of physicists and mathematicians, but since the real world that we inhabit is indeed quantum, it’s no surprise that imaginary numbers can be found, quite clearly, within

Instapaper: Thursday, Jul. 14th (Instapaper)

  • Your Highlight at location 225-226 | Added on Friday, 15 July 2022 20:38:42

History , story , spell —there is in this etymological record a fable on the relationship between the human mind and the cosmos.

Instapaper: Thursday, Jul. 14th (Instapaper)

  • Your Highlight at location 232-234 | Added on Friday, 15 July 2022 20:39:48

Our minds discard features that don’t fit a chosen narrative, exaggerate elements that confirm the story we already believe in, fabricate out of whole-cloth details that don’t exist but ought to, and with each recollection, our memory is retold, respun, rewoven.

I and Thou (Unknown)

  • Your Highlight on page 12 | location 174-176 | Added on Friday, 15 July 2022 21:56:50

For the argument is not as it were horizontal, but spiral; it mounts, and gathers within itself the aphoristic and pregnant utterances of the earlier part.

I and Thou (Unknown)

  • Your Highlight on page 13 | location 192-192 | Added on Friday, 15 July 2022 21:58:26

There is no I taken in itself, but only the I of the primary word I-Thou and the I of the primary word I-it.

I and Thou (Unknown)

  • Your Highlight on page 17 | location 246-248 | Added on Saturday, 16 July 2022 12:06:42

Just as the melody is not made up of notes nor the verse of words nor the statue of lines, but they must be tugged and dragged till their unity has been scattered into these many pieces, so with the man to whom I say Thou.

Instapaper: Monday, Jul. 11th (Instapaper)

  • Your Highlight at location 1667-1668 | Added on Sunday, 17 July 2022 22:35:46

noiseless messengers sent forth to flicker ghost-like through space, and collect the news of other worlds.”

Instapaper: Thursday, Jul. 14th (Instapaper)

  • Your Highlight at location 297-298 | Added on Wednesday, 20 July 2022 22:01:37

because empathy forces us to take up another, albeit biased, perspective on the world, it actually ends up making us more, not less objective.

Instapaper: Thursday, Jul. 14th (Instapaper)

  • Your Highlight at location 314-321 | Added on Wednesday, 20 July 2022 22:04:07

Though Heidegger understood how important action is to our understanding, it was only with Maurice Merleau-Ponty that the true importance of the body came to the fore. The world, he argued, is a space of possibilities, determined partly by our capacity for movement. Our skill in moving our bodies opens up new ways of engaging with what’s around us and, therefore, new ways of thinking about it. Rather than concepts or ideas, what organises our experience is our ‘readiness’ to encounter and interact with objects, people and the environment. Our consciousness is characterised more by ‘I can’ than by ‘I think’. This radical departure from traditional ways of thinking about the mind, in fact, has recently regained popularity in the sciences of the mind, under umbrellas such as ‘embodied cognition’ and ‘4E cognition’ (a shorthand for the idea that thought is embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended).

Instapaper: Monday, Jul. 11th (Instapaper)

  • Your Highlight at location 2059-2060 | Added on Wednesday, 20 July 2022 22:22:19

To bring about a globally just and sustainable economy, large areas of production and consumption will need to be dismantled, while other systems will need to be built in their place.

I and Thou (Unknown)

  • Your Highlight on page 21 | location 322-322 | Added on Thursday, 21 July 2022 23:05:52

Love is responsibility of an I for a Thou.

Tao Te Ching (Laozi)

  • Your Highlight on page 78 | location 1196-1197 | Added on Thursday, 21 July 2022 23:24:33

To know and yet (think) we do not know is the highest (attainment); not to know (and yet think) we do know is a disease.

Instapaper: Thursday, Jul. 14th (Instapaper)

  • Your Highlight at location 999-1002 | Added on Saturday, 23 July 2022 15:10:39

I began to realize that my identity depended, not upon any beliefs I had, inherited beliefs or manufactured beliefs, but my identity actually depended on how much attention I was paying to things that were other than myself, and that as you deepen this intentionality and this attention, you started to broaden and deepen your own sense of presence.

Instapaper: Thursday, Jul. 14th (Instapaper)

  • Your Highlight at location 1073-1073 | Added on Saturday, 23 July 2022 16:17:26

This is another delusion we have, that we can take a sincere path in life without having our heart broken.

Instapaper: Thursday, Jul. 14th (Instapaper)

  • Your Highlight at location 1113-1116 | Added on Saturday, 23 July 2022 16:24:21

I do think there is a quality of youthfulness which is appropriate to every decade of our life. It just looks different. We have this fixed idea of youthfulness from our teens or our 20s. But actually, there’s a form of youthfulness you’re supposed to inhabit when you’re in your 70s or your 80s or your 90s. It’s the sense of imminent surprise, of imminent revelation, except the revelation and the discovery is more magnified. It has more to do with your mortality and what you’re going to pass on and leave behind you, the shape of your own absence.

Instapaper: Thursday, Jul. 14th (Instapaper)

  • Your Highlight at location 1140-1142 | Added on Saturday, 23 July 2022 16:41:54

in a good marital argument, when one person has said the truth, both people are emancipated into the next stage of the relationship. Unfortunately, if you are not the person who said it, you have to have a little rear-guard action where you deny it, but eventually you have to say, I wish I’d have said that.

Instapaper: Thursday, Jul. 14th (Instapaper)

  • Your Highlight at location 1220-1225 | Added on Sunday, 24 July 2022 12:01:54

The way I interpreted it was the discipline of asking beautiful questions and that a beautiful question shapes a beautiful mind. And so the ability to ask beautiful questions — often in very un-beautiful moments — is one of the great disciplines of a human life. And a beautiful question starts to shape your identity as much by asking it as it does by having it answered. And you don’t have to do anything about it, you just have to keep asking. And before you know it, you will find yourself actually shaping a different life, meeting different people, finding conversations that are leading you in those directions that you wouldn’t even have seen before.

Instapaper: Thursday, Jul. 14th (Instapaper)

  • Your Highlight at location 1242-1243 | Added on Sunday, 24 July 2022 13:14:36

one of the astonishing qualities of being human is the measure of our reluctance to be here, actually. And I think one of the great necessities of self-knowledge is understanding and even tasting the single malt essence of your own reluctance to be here:

Instapaper: Wednesday, Jul. 27th (Instapaper)

  • Your Highlight at location 547-551 | Added on Thursday, 28 July 2022 22:43:14

In ecological economics, we’ve tried to make a distinction between development and growth. When something grows, it gets bigger physically by accretion or assimilation of material. When something develops, it gets better in a qualitative sense. It doesn’t have to get bigger. An example of that is computers. You can do fantastic computations now with a small material base in the computer. That’s real development. And the art of living is not synonymous with “more stuff.” People occasionally glimpse this, and then we fall back into more, more, more.

Instapaper: Wednesday, Jul. 27th (Instapaper)

  • Your Highlight at location 475-479 | Added on Friday, 29 July 2022 23:01:21

Risen argues that superstitions and other powerful intuitions can be so compelling that we simply cannot shake them off, despite knowing that they are wrong. According to her, System 2 is not simply lazy and inattentive, it is also “a bit of a pushover”; it will not override the result of System 1 if the feelings associated with that result are too strong. Many magical beliefs occur because we rely on System 1’s simple heuristics and employ them in situations where these rules do not apply. Even though System 2 knows they are wrong, it fails to correct the erroneous logic and thus acquiesces to magical beliefs.