–Neuharth
Thomas Dolby – She Blinded Me With Science (YouTube )
A pretty name as one would wish to read, must perch harmonious on my tuneful quill.
There’s music in the sighing of a reed; there’s music in the gushing of a rill; there’s music in all things, if men had ears: their Earth is but an echo of the spheres.
Don Juan by Lord Byron
Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.
Chapter 3 – The Chapel, Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Singer: Is there anything you’ve been able to draw upon, David? Is there comfort in the past?
Milch: I feel the past falling away and the attachments of regret for what wasn’t done or was done badly or was done without sufficient sympathy, and it was for that reason that our granddaughter’s visit was such a redemptive and compelling occurrence. Everything is an adventure for her and a delight and a surprise, an opening up, and that’s a big gratification.
Singer: I’ve never thought of you as a sentimental person, but maybe I misread that. How would you characterize yourself?
Milch: As an unsentimental person.
–David Milch’s Third Act by Mark Singer (New Yorker May 20, 2019)
Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain you of your all, cling onto your back, and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it devour your remains, for all things will kill you, both slowly & fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.
Kinky Friedman
Who but an atheist could think of leaving the world without having first made up his account?
It is then he will find in what mighty stead that heathen goddess, that virtue, which you and all other deists of the age adore, will stand him.
Tom Jones (1749) by Henry Fielding
Avoid at all cost the priorities in your life that aren’t in your top five, because they’re the ambitions insufficiently important to form the core of your life, yet seductive enough to distract you from the priorities that matter most.
Oliver Burkeman
Anomie Theory describes the effects of early industrialism and the resulting social division of labor with rising suicide rate. Accordingly, in times of social upheaval, “collective consciousness” is weakened and previous norms, moral convictions, and controls dwindle.
Durkheim
The world is a post-apocalyptic ecocide desert wasteland caused by societal collapse and warfare, where petrol and water are scarce resources.