Sonika Vuyyuru

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on the atlas — 35

highlights — 103

Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one's sanity becomes an object of speculation among one's acquaintances.
On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue | Vogue
On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us.
On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue | Vogue
It is a kind of ritual, helping us to remember who and what we are. In order to remember it, one must have known it.
On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue | Vogue
They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.
On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue | Vogue
Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.
On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue | Vogue
In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues
On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue | Vogue
Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named corespondent. If they choose to forego their work—say it is screenwriting—in favor of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne Frank.
On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue | Vogue
It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation
On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue | Vogue
I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships that hampered others
On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue | Vogue
Moral self-consciousness, indeed, lets its universal aspect get detached, so that this aspect becomes a nature of its own
Conscience
spirit that has recovered itself after and through disruption, is absolute freedom
Conscience
The antinomy in the moral view of the world — viz. that there is a moral consciousness and that there is none, or that the validity, the bindingness of duty has its ground beyond consciousness, and conversely only takes effect in consciousness
Conscience
In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
Cargo Cult Science
Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn’t do “the right thing,” according to the experts.
Cargo Cult Science
If they cannot, then the only moral world that can be built is fundamentally inhuman anyways.
Failing To Do Good - Unverified Revelations
In most cases the practical world we live in is more ecological - we must keep different systems and drives in balance. “Which would you choose to keep, your heart or your lungs?” is not a meaningful choice - you will die without both. Hard tradeoffs are often tragic.
Failing To Do Good - Unverified Revelations
Effective Altruism is looking for things that scale, and many important human endeavours don’t scale - like providing attentive, loving care for a child. It’s fine to look for things that scale, but looking only for good that scales neglects the most important aspects of the human condition.
Failing To Do Good - Unverified Revelations
People recycled dutifully for years (and still do) despite it being esssentially fake.
Failing To Do Good - Unverified Revelations
A very simplistic moral trope - “it is good to feed the poor” - led her to something unproductive.
Failing To Do Good - Unverified Revelations
But even on my student budget I could have bought him a ticket, though I might have had to tighten my belt a bit. I might have made a difference in that young man’s life, with only minor inconvenience to myself. I hope he was able to see his mother while she was still alive. If not, there is a tear in the moral fabric of the world that I might have prevented.
Failing To Do Good - Unverified Revelations
This leads to a marketplace of low effort gestures that we can pat ourselves on the back for and not interrogate too closely.
Failing To Do Good - Unverified Revelations
The figure of the beautiful soul is this moment of morality where the judging consciousness of conscience seeks to preserve its own purity by fleeing the world where active selves are deemed corrupt
The Way of the Impure. On the Beautiful Soul, Evil, and… | by Simone A. Medina Polo | Medium
Kant resists nature and actuality as a necessary essence of morality — furthermore, Kant is not serious about his own claims in that pure duty cannot be accomplished without becoming impure, thus its actualization is deferred continuously as a pure duty without satisfying the imperative injunction that drives it into morality.
The Way of the Impure. On the Beautiful Soul, Evil, and… | by Simone A. Medina Polo | Medium
True, it was an easy mistake to make. Many others, with my level of experience, would have made it too. But they didn’t, and I did. It wasn’t just that the rocks snapped. It was that I got it wrong. I thought I was good enough to not get it wrong. It turns out that I wasn’t. I failed accordingly – and thus had an accident, which not only changed everything, but unjustified me in the process.
Forms of Failure - by Paul S - Diary of a Punter
Both are a function of luck, one external and the other internal. But failures of internal luck seem to cut deeper than “merely” suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Forms of Failure - by Paul S - Diary of a Punter
Not only is there nothing he can say to his family to justify having abandoned them, there is nothing he can say to himself that can finally justify his having done so, either.
Forms of Failure - by Paul S - Diary of a Punter
Of particular interest is the subjective experience. The blind participant Roger Behm describes the experience of the BrainPort: Last year, when I was up here for the first time, we were doing stuff on the table, in the kitchen. And I got kind of... a little emotional, because it's 33 years since I've seen before. And I could reach out and see the different-sized balls. I mean I visually see them. I could reach out and grab them—not grope or feel for them—pick them up, and see the cup, and raise my hand and drop it right in the cup (Bains, 2007).
The future of sensory substitution, addition, and expansion via haptic devices - PMC
“I wanted to be someone who writes great poetry,” he said. “I didn’t want to write great poetry.” Now he sees that version of himself as almost a complete stranger.
June Huh, High School Dropout, Wins the Fields Medal | Quanta Magazine
The brain's neural networks take in signals from sensory inputs and extract informationally-relevant patterns. It strives to adjust to whatever information it receives and works to extract what it can. As long as the data reflects some relevant feature about the outside world, the brain works to decode it (Eagleman, 2020).
The future of sensory substitution, addition, and expansion via haptic devices - PMC
He wrote about love all the time, for one. It never really saved his characters, but it allowed their histories to braid into intertwined fates; still doomed, but larger than a lonely soul.
The Paris Review - On Cormac McCarthy - The Paris Review
When I started Play It As It Lays I gave Maria a child, a daughter, Kate, who was in kindergarten. I remember writing a passage in which Kate came home from school and showed Maria a lot of drawings, orange and blue crayon drawings, and when Maria asked her what they were, Kate said, “Pools on fire.” You can see I wasn't having too much success writing this child. So I put her in a hospital. You never meet her. Now, it turned out to have a great deal of importance—Kate's being in the hospital is a very large element in Play It As It Lays—but it began because I couldn't write a child, no other …
Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 71, Joan Didion
I think I really put the novel in Sacramento because I was homesick. I wanted to remember the weather and the rivers.
Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction
but it wasn't of very much interest to me because I hated it both ways.
Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction
Again, I was not very sure of myself then, or I never would have changed the title.
Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction
Was the book autobiographical? I ask this for the obvious reason that first novels often are.
Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction
When I had about a hundred and fifty pages done I showed them to twelve publishers, all of whom passed. The thirteenth, Ivan Obolensky, gave me an advance, and with that thousand dollars or whatever it was I took a two-month leave of absence and wrote the last half of the book.
Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction
your style is your sensibility
Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction
A certain amount of resistance is good for anybody. It keeps you awake.
Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction
I dealt with it the same way I deal with everything. I just tended my own garden, didn't pay much attention, behaved—I suppose—deviously. I mean I didn't actually let too many people know what I was doing.
Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction
A man who wrote novels had a role in the world, and he could play that role and do whatever he wanted behind it. A woman who wrote novels had no particular role.
Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction
want it to be the world.
Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction
Yes, and the last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up. It should make you go back and start reading from page one. That's how it should be, but it doesn't always work.
Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction
Sentences withsinkholes. You could drown in them. I wouldn't dare to write one. I'm not even sure I'd dare to read James again. I loved those novels so much that I was paralyzed by them for a long time.
Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction
I mean they're perfect sentences. Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.
Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction
Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.
Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction
Wittgenstein says somewhere that flowers or animals that we find ugly always seem to look like something else: ‘that looks like a …’, we say. If an ugly thing is always something else, then, a beautiful thing must never be anything but itself.
Exhausting Beauty - by Anna - Philosophical Crumbs
‘There is too much to see in the world,’ she said. ‘If I open my eyes for so much as five seconds, I find it unbearable.’
Exhausting Beauty - by Anna - Philosophical Crumbs
‘There is too much to see in the world,’ she said. ‘If I open my eyes for so much as five seconds, I find it unbearable.’
Exhausting Beauty - by Anna - Philosophical Crumbs
Sometimes, with my eyes closed, I’d consider the fact that if I stayed still for long enough—for months and months—my body would eventually be broken down by the very sun and grass and bugs I loved in that moment, regenerating the earth with my cells.
A memento mori for the anxious age - by Courtney Bowers
But if you dislike quiet, human-scaled places—you’re simply disconnected from Nature or God, whatever your theology.
How to Waste your Time - by Vizi Andrei