February 2012
9 posts
“What madness for a fleeting being like man always to look far into a future...”
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau, calling me out for daydreaming
6 tags
“‘Propose what can be done,’ they never stop repeating to me. It is...”
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Emile) giving voice to every idealist who’s been naysaid time & again.
2 tags
“Basically, here’s how it works: Students are given a weekly grid and must select...”
– the kind of homework that should be assigned (via squishynotslick)
1 tag
Marriage & Commitment
Kurt Braunohler: I do have a theory now. I do have a theory about if I do get married in the future. What I think I would want to do is have an agreement that at the end of seven years, we have to get remarried in order for the marriage to continue. But at the end of seven years, it ends. And we can agree to get remarried or not gTet remarried.
Ira Glass: I don’t know what I think of that. Because I think, actually, one of the things that’s a comfort in marriage is that there isn’t a door at seven years. And so if something is messed up in the short-term, there’s a comfort of knowing, well, we made this commitment. And so we’re just going to work this out. And even if tonight we’re not getting along or there’s something between us that doesn’t feel right, you have the comfort of knowing, we’ve got time. We’re going to figure this out. And that makes it so much easier. Because you do go through times when you hate each other’s guts. You know what I mean?
(via wesleyhill, see blog.marriagedebate.com/2012/02/what-i-did-for-love-this-american-life.html)
1 tag
“Our cause is never in more danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but...”
– Screwtape, C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters.
I have to have read this book a half dozen times by now. It never gets old.
3 tags
“Don’t we all “waste” our time with one activity or another? … [T]he very...”
– S. W. F. Knecht: Why a blog?
Squishy Not Slick: This has something to do with... →
squishynotslick:
“Soon it became clear to me that quietly and en masse, French parents were achieving outcomes that created a whole different atmosphere for family life. When American families visited our home, the parents usually spent much of the visit refereeing their kids’ spats, helping their toddlers do laps around the kitchen island, or getting down on the floor to build Lego villages....
“For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a...”
– from Adam Gopnik’s essay on mass incarceration and criminal justice in America (via wesleyhill)