Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
-Dr. King
Category: quotes
Augmenting The Theme
Since 2018 is the year of “make something every day,” here’s some good advice about that and your career. (This essay, “How To Do What You Love,” gives you a lot to think about.)
Always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don’t take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you’re producing, you’ll know you’re not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you’re actually writing.
“Always produce” is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you’re supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. “Always produce” will discover your life’s work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.
Wednesday Words
From my friend Jason’s blog, some encouraging words:
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
— Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
(Also encouraging: Doug Jones’ win in Alabama!)
“The Eileen Fisher Years”
I told a friend recently that “suddenly Eileen Fisher clothing stopped looking frumpy and started looking really cool.” I joked that it meant I was getting old, but there was more to it than that, and new-to-me printmaker and artist Jen Hewitt summed it up pretty well:
“Someone recently remarked on Twitter that she felt that she’d inadvertently slipped into the Eileen Fisher years, and I knew exactly what she meant. I’m so there. Give me unfussy, comfortable, well-made clothes in flattering styles. Make those clothes out of natural fibers. Let me pair them with flats and clogs. I spent my twenties and much of my thirties in uncomfortable clothes and shoes, believing that torturing myself was the key to beauty. I’m so over that.”
Ode To Slow Cooking
In a sure sign of my approaching 40s, I finally got a Crock-Pot. Sunday evenings we visit Doc’s family and usually combine that with errands, so we’re not home until 8. Figuring out dinner after all of that (on top of figuring out Sunday breakfast and lunch) was getting to be way too difficult.
The Crock-Pot is everything I hoped it would be: You put ingredients in in the morning and come home to food. The first time I used it I kept thinking, “It is cooking but you are not,” and realized that’s a Laurie Colwin quote, from More Home Cooking (she’s talking about a flame tamer instead of a Crock-Pot, but same concept):
On a flame tamer, a good black bean soup takes at least 5 hours to cook, hours in which you could be writing a novel, composing a brief, arguing with your dry cleaner, or playing catch with your child and her friends. You might yak on the telephone, balance your checkbook, or go through piles of work. You might even go shopping for yourself, remembering to stop afterward to buy some bread and cheese. But whatever you do, while your soup is cooking, you are not.
There’s A “Little House” Quote For Literally Everything
Something bulky stood in the wagon box, covered by a horse blanket. Laura wondered what it was, but she had no time to look. […] As soon as possible, Pa came hurrying back He lifted the blanket away, and there stood a shining new sewing machine.
“Oh, Charles!” Ma gasped
“Yes, Caroline, it is yours,” Pa said proudly. “there’ll be a lot of extra sewing, with Mary coming home and Laura going away, and I thought you’d need some help.”
“But how could you?” Ma asked, touching the shiny black iron of the machine’s legs.
“I had to sell a cow anyway, Caroline, there wouldn’t be room in the stable next winter unless I did.”
[..]”It is beautiful,” Ma said, “and what a help it will be. I can hardly wait to use it.”
But this was late on Saturday afternoon. The sewing machine must stand still over Sunday.
-Laura Ingalls Wilder, These Happy Golden Years
Summer Feelings
Most of July has been over or near 100 degrees. The foothills are tinder-dry, it’s hot at all but the highest elevations, and the yard is looking pretty crispy. I’m thoroughly tired of the AC running non-stop and the fight to keep things from burning up, but this week I noticed it’s getting dark closer to 9:00 now instead of 9:30 and felt that same old pang: The tide of summer is headed out.
I started to do the math in my head–a week and a half until August, then only another month of steady weather and six weeks of longer light–and thought of this quote I found a few years ago:
Pelle had already begun to dread the awful day when they would all have to go back to town. He had an old comb with as many teeth as the summer had days. Every morning he broke off a tooth and noticed anxiously how the comb grew thinner and thinner.
Melker saw the comb one morning and threw it away. To worry about the future was the wrong attitude toward life, he said. One should enjoy each day as it came. On a sunny morning like the present one, life was nothing but happiness. How wonderful it was to go straight out into the garden in pajamas, feeling the dew-wet grass under one’s feet, and then take a dip from the jetty and afterward sit down at the painted garden table to read a book or the paper while drinking delicious coffee.
Astrid Lindgren, Seacrow Island
More Laurie Colwin
I thought I would start my annual re-read of Dune this summer but it appears I’ve taken a detour into re-reading Laurie Colwin. That’s ok, though; she’s a delight. From Happy All the Time:
“That’s just it,” said Vincent. “I keep waiting around for someone to tell me to shape up, but no one does. I keep thinking that when I’m older, I’ll get a grip on all this. One morning, I’ll wake up and be a grownup.”
“No, you won’t,” said Guido. “You’ll just wake up and feel tireder than usual and then you’ll find that you’ve run out of patience with a lot of things you thought were normal.”
In The Highlands
“The chief feature of the landscape, and of your life in it, was the air. […] The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever-changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has a blue vigor to it, and at a short distance it painted the ranges of hills and the woods a fresh deep blue. […] Up in this high air, you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.”
(It must be June if I’m quoting Out of Africa again.)
Reading Laurie Colwin Again
The older I get, the more I think that no one write about food or relationships better than Laurie. (Sorry, Mary Frances. I still love your food writing but you had a lot of baggage.) I picked up A Big Storm Knocked it Over again over the weekend and found this:
She and Teddy had simply merged their possessions and were now thinking about buying a sideboard. Jane Louise had never bought a piece of furniture with another person in her life. It seemed to her an act of almost exotic intimacy. After all, anyone can sleep with anyone, but few people not closely connected purchase furniture in common.