flâneur

Gargi Bala

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on the atlas — 6

highlights — 24

  • Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid. At least 1 per cent will probably devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits of some public importance, and, since they will not depend upon these pursuits for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered, and there will be no need to conform to the stand…
    In Praise of Idleness: Bertrand Russell on the Relationship Between Leisure and Social Justice – The Marginalian
  • The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life. If it were, we should have to consider every navvy superior to Shakespeare. We have been misled in this matter by two causes. One is the necessity of keeping the poor contented, which has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labor, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect. The other is the new pleasure in mechanism, which makes us delight in the astonishingly clever changes that we can produce on…
    In Praise of Idleness: Bertrand Russell on the Relationship Between Leisure and Social Justice – The Marginalian
  • The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own. Of course the holders of power conceal this fact from themselves by managing to believe that their interests are identical with the larger interests of humanity.
    In Praise of Idleness: Bertrand Russell on the Relationship Between Leisure and Social Justice – The Marginalian
  • My advice to the person suffering from lack of time and from apathy is this: Seek out each day as many as possible of the small joys, and thriftily save up the larger, more demanding pleasures for holidays and appropriate hours. It is the small joys first of all that are granted us for recreation, for daily relief and disburdenment, not the great ones.
    Hermann Hesse on Little Joys, Breaking the Trance of Busyness, and the Most Important Habit for Living with Presence – The Marginalian
  • “Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work,” Kierkegaard admonished in 1843 as he contemplated our greatest source of unhappiness.
    Hermann Hesse on Little Joys, Breaking the Trance of Busyness, and the Most Important Habit for Living with Presence – The Marginalian
  • As Thoreau so well knew, and so painstakingly tried to show us, what a man most needs is not a knowledge of how to get more, but a knowledge of the most he can do without, and of how to get along without it. The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge of minimums; it might be thought to be the art of minimums.
    The Measure of a Rich Life: Wendell Berry on the Key to Mirth Under Hardship and Delight as a Force of Resistance to Consumerism – The Marginalian
  • There were two heavy facts that Nick accepted and lived with: life is hard, full of work and pain and weariness, and at the end of it a man has got to go farther than he can imagine from any place he knows. And yet within the confines of those acknowledged facts, he was a man rich in pleasures. They were not large pleasures, they cost little or nothing, often they could not be anticipated, and yet they surrounded him; they were possible at almost any time, or at odd times, or at off times. They were pleasures to which a man had to be acutely and intricately attentive, or he could not have them…
    The Measure of a Rich Life: Wendell Berry on the Key to Mirth Under Hardship and Delight as a Force of Resistance to Consumerism – The Marginalian
  • There was pleasure in quitting work. There were certain pleasures in the work itself. There was pleasure in hunting and in going to town, and in visiting and in having company. There was pleasure in observing and remembering the behavior of things, and in telling about it. There was pleasure in knowing where a fox lived, and in planning to run it, and in running it. And… Nick knew how to use his mind for pleasure; he remembered and thought and pondered and imagined. He was a master of what William Carlos Williams called the customs of necessity.
    The Measure of a Rich Life: Wendell Berry on the Key to Mirth Under Hardship and Delight as a Force of Resistance to Consumerism – The Marginalian
  • From Nick, who had been working hard since childhood for the smallest of wages and with the slimmest of prospects for living any other way, Berry learned one of the hardest, most beautiful truths about living a rich life — a kind of existential contemplative practice of inclining the mind, whatever the conditions of the body, toward delight
    The Measure of a Rich Life: Wendell Berry on the Key to Mirth Under Hardship and Delight as a Force of Resistance to Consumerism – The Marginalian
  • “I have always had a quarrel with this country not only about race but about the standards by which it appears to live,” James Baldwin told Margaret Mead as they sat down together to reimagine democracy for a post-consumerist world.
    The Measure of a Rich Life: Wendell Berry on the Key to Mirth Under Hardship and Delight as a Force of Resistance to Consumerism – The Marginalian
  • Hope needs a place to perch. To have any meaning, any validity, any use or power, it must be founded upon agency, upon the deep-seated capacity to change. To change first oneself – already a process of negotiation with the world – and then to change everything else. To learn, to make relationships, to process, to move energy from one place to another: these are both fundamental requirements of a healthy organism, and necessary steps in building a nest for hope, for making it meaningful and actionable.
    Hope needs a place to perch | booktwo.org
  • We make the future, moment by moment, by our actions in the present, which is the place in which we have agency.
    Hope needs a place to perch | booktwo.org
  • “It’s crucial to keep imagining that things could get better, and furthermore to imagine how they might get better. Here no doubt one has to avoid Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” which is perhaps thinking and saying that things will get better without doing the work of imagining how. In avoiding that, it may be best to recall the Romain Rolland quote so often attributed to Gramsci, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Or maybe we should just give up entirely on optimism or pessimism—we have to do this work no matter how we feel about it. So by force of will or the sheer default of e…
    Hope needs a place to perch | booktwo.org
  • Anything you can learn to do builds your capacity, creates agency, puts you in charge of your own life and makes it meaningful. Only then can hope settle, and be put to use.
    Hope needs a place to perch | booktwo.org
  • “Hope” is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul -
    “Hope” is the thing with feathers | The Poetry Foundation
  • Being able to spin up a room of your own with a few clicks is one of the great advantages we have over previous generations. Make use of it.
    Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
  • Writing a blog is not like writing for a publication. There is no preexisting audience you have to please. The audience is created as a reflection of your curiosity. A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.
    Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
  • To grow skilled, you need to push yourself outside your comfort zone and put your goals a little beyond what you can pull off. But also? You need to finish and publish stuff because there are certain things you can only learn by finishing. Deadlines are the tool I use to balance this tradeoff.
    Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
  • Write a hundred pieces. Each time take one thing and make it better: a better title, better structure, better ending, better descriptions, better dialogue. Just one thing. It adds up.
    Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
  • Don’t aim too high when you write your first posts. Maybe just do 500-word pieces, and do them with a simple format.
    Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
  • the format encourages you to write from emotion. You are talking to someone you like and you want to resonate with them, you want to make them laugh. This creates a surge in the writing. It is lovely. When you write from your head, your style sinks back under the waves. This, however, is not an excuse to be lazy in your thinking. You have to put your thoughts in order. But the time to do this is before you write for publication.
    Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
  • Write in a way that lets you refine your thoughts about the things that matter. Write to experience what you care about in higher resolution, write to enhance your feeling of aliveness.
    Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
  • The more you incorporate everything that you love and that comes easily for you, your interests, your sense of humor, your grammatical tics, etc, the more your style emerges.
    Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
  • It is what is odd about you that is interesting. If you work hard, you will be able to write like everyone else in your genre, but the result will never be rich as the texture of your own personality. So, don’t think too much about how you are supposed to write, how others do it, or what the conventions demand. Just try to amuse yourself.
    Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog