Art is the speech of an artist, of an individual, and it testifies to the power of individuals to speak and to the power of other individuals to listen and understand.
Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg, by the side of which more will be laid. Thoughts accidentally thrown together become a frame in which more may be developed and exhibited… Having by chance recorded a few disconnected thoughts and brought them into juxtaposition, they suggest a whole new field in which it was possible to labor and to think. Thought begat thought.
Via Austin Kleon
Ralph Waldo Emerson, not in a universal eyeball kind of mood—
“Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.”
via Poetic Outlaws
In an essay I've just seen at The New Yorker, A Hundred Classics to Get Me Through a Hundred Days of Trump, Jill Lepore describes what she calls her "doomscrolling methadone," the way she used to get through Trump's Hundred Days. it sounds as if Lepore merely stumbled on the technique. I'm still jealous as I wonder why I didn't think of that. I've got a couple of things in my library that I could put to good use in the coming months, A Year with Rumi, A Year with Kafka, Day by Day with Emerson.