We are all of us compelled to read for profit, party for contacts, bowl for unity, drive for mileage, and stay married for the sake of the children. To do things not for themselves but for some supposed advantage they will bring is to have lost the ability to live.
A lot of the job of teaching philosophy at a public university is teaching people who don't want to learn. So I developed this preoccupation with: what would it be like if you tried to find the people who only want to learn? Suppose you could just filter for the desire to learn.
At eleven, I was beginning to see how the moment we incline action toward achievement, we drain the activity of joy; how anything we approach transactionally will never yield transcendence.
I love how it views creativity as something spiritual that works best when it just flows. That is something I need to remind myself of at times because it's so easy to fall into the trappings of constraining your imagination to fit within the mandates that buyers want or the expectations that audiences have rather than the freedom of where a thought takes you.
3mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
