Perfection?

Nature encourages no looseness, pardons no errors

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Job vs career

Evidently this new career wasn’t all thrills. There were spills, too, for some, maybe for me. Already I’d noted a few slippery patches. Little jobs had no such peaks and troughs, what you saw was what you got. You did what you were told to do, had as good a time doing it as possible and at five on the dot you forgot all about it. Little jobs didn’t raise ripples in the mind, didn’t disturb the surface at all. A career, on the other hand, seeped into evenings and weekends, popped up even in dreams, in fact took up so much of life that to all intents and purposes it was life, which might explain why it kept coming up with the same kind of questions: what am I here for, where am I going, is what I’m doing right or wrong? And, like life, the answers were never straightforward, often depressing. Very often there were none at all.

--Jill Tweedie, ‘Eating Children’

This and that

We don't realize how quickly we will adapt to a pleasurable event and make it the backdrop of our lives.When any event occurs to us,we make it ordinary.And through becoming ordinary,we lose our pleasure.

--Tim Wilson

Red Rider - White Hot

To be or not to be

"In every generation, there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness so that we mostly conform, we hide our secret identities beneath false skins of those identities which bear the belongers' seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds—because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves—we soar, we fly, we flee."


--Salman Rushdie

Love is contradictory

“When we fall in love, we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom you were attached as children. On the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted on us. So, love contains in it the contradiction, the attempts to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past.”
--crimes and misdemeanors(1989)

we were a generation

We took the world as given.Cigarettes
Were twenty-several cents a pack, and gas
as much per gallon. Sex came wrapped in rubber
And veiled in supernatural scruples—call
Them chivalry. A certain breathlessness
Was felt; perhaps the Bomb, which after all
Mushroomed us as we entered puberty,
Waking us from the newspaper-nightmare

Our childhoods had napped through, was realer then;
Our lives, at least, were not assumed to be
Our right; we lived, by shifts, on sufferance.
The world contained policemen, true; and these
Should be avoided; governments were bunk,
But well-intentioned; blacks were beautiful
But seldom seen; the poor were with ye always.
We thought one war as moral as the next,

Believed that life was tragic and absurd,
And were absurdly cheerful on that basis.
We loved John Donne and Hopkins, Yeats and Pound,
Medieval history was rather swank,
Psychology was in the mind; abstract
Things grabbed us where we lived; the only life
Worth living was the private life, and—last,
Worst scandal in this characterization—


We did not know we were a generation.


--John Updike