I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely “played.”
May Sarton
Letter to Louise Bogan
3rd July 1955
Via Letters of Note
I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely “played.”
May Sarton
Letter to Louise Bogan
3rd July 1955
Via Letters of Note
“All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.”
Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.
David Bowie via philosophical.quote
In brain-scrambling times like these, I like to read old books. I’m currently reading one of Michel de Montaigne’s essays every morning to avoid a.m. doomscrolling. 400 years ago, Montaigne wrote in “On Prognostications” about “the stubborn curiosity of our nature which delights in worrying about the future as if it had not enough to deal with in the present.” He then quotes Lucian: “Let the mind of men be blind to what is to be. May those who fear be permitted to hope.”
This makes me wonder why I didn’t think of that. My habit is to write every morning, but that usually makes me think more about the state of affairs these days, just increases the impulse towards doomscrolling.
I often think of Auden's poem "The Horatians": "We can only / do what it seems to us we were made for, look at / this world with a happy eye / but from a sober perspective.” That's my ambition, and controlling my attention helps me to draw closer to it.
Alan Jacobs, in thought-provoking post on reflecting and sharing