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Suspended Reason
Commonplace
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“The current memoir craze has fostered the belief that confession is therapeutic, that therapy is redemptive and that redemption equals art, and it has encouraged the delusion that candor, daring and shamelessness are substitutes for craft, that the exposed life is the same thing as an examined one.”

"A nuclear missile silo is one of the quintessential Great Plains objects: to the eye, it is almost nothing, just one or two acres of ground with a concrete slab in the middle and some posts and poles sticking up behind an eight-foot-high cyclone fence: but to the imagination, it is the end of the world." Ian Frazier, Great Plains, 1989

A recent Saturday morning found Mr. Kelley rambling in the garden while smoking an herbal palliative the size of a cigar. He self-medicates in this fashion at certain times of the day, like when he is awake and doesn’t have food in his mouth.

If people lacked this capacity to receive the thoughts conceived by the men who preceded them, and to pass on to others their own thoughts, men would be like wild beasts.

"And sometimes the player believed the universe had spoken to it through the light that fell from the crisp night sky of winter, where a fleck of light in the corner of the player's eye might be a star a million times as massive as the sun, boiling its planets to plasma in order to be visible for a moment to the player, walking home at the far side of the universe, suddenly smelling food, almost at the familiar door, about to dream again

And sometimes the player believed the universe had spoken to it through the zeros and ones, through the electricity of the world, through the scrolling words on a screen at the end of a dream

And the universe said I love you

And the universe said you have played the game well

And the universe said everything you need is within you

And the universe said you are stronger than you know

And the universe said you are the daylight

And the universe said you are the night

And the universe said the darkness you fight is within you

And the universe said the light you seek is within you".

And the universe said you have played t…
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If an inquiry thus carefully conducted should fail at last of discovering the truth, it may answer an end perhaps as useful, in discovering to us the weakness of our own understanding. If it does not make us knowing, it may make us modest. If it does not preserve us from error, it may at least from the spirit of error; and may make us cautious of pronouncing with positiveness or with haste, when so much labour may end in so much uncertainty.

Burke, Preface on Beauty & The Subl…

You have to be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else - that's how you'll get ahead. (p. 19)

Kleon, A. (2012). Steal Like An Artist. Ten Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative. Workman Publishing Company: New York.

Go Deeper
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Wayne Kostenbaum, “In Defense of Nuance”
Wayne Kostenbaum, “In Defense of Nuance

“Every system has two sets of rules: The rules as they are intended or commonly perceived, and the actual rules (‘reality’). In most complex systems, the gap between these two sets of rules is huge.”

— Paul Buchheit

Paul Buchheit
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