Author: phillip

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A Fighter’s Heart

Author: Sam Sheridan
Rating: 7/10
Last Read: April 2014

Quick Summary:  A guy who has found himself in possession of a bunch of cash and the intention to not work decides to dedicate himself to becoming a fighter.  The book covers his journey through different fights and training camps, and provides insight into the mind of a fighter and the athletes who participate in the sport.

My Takeaways

Fundamentals are important.

Fighting is not totally about violence – even if it is a violent activity.  There can be a sense of peace and satisfaction that arises out of the struggling with others and learning to master yourself.

It captured the idea that life is born of struggle and striving, that true joy and understanding do not come from comfort and safety; they come from epiphany born in exhaustion (and not exhaustion for its own sake). Safety and comfort are mortal danger to the soul.

My Highlights 

I learned one of the most important lessons in life: Keep your mouth shut. –loc 98

I was discovering the key to building endurance: Push on when you feel you can’t, and next time that moment will come later. I –loc 476

This is a guy who kicked so hard that if you blocked with your arm, he’d break it—and yet he had the utter control to not be baited. That’s what I admired, more than anything. Apidej is a devout Buddhist, and he meditated often, and I was curious about that. Something in that attitude seemed like the real warrior attitude, secure in self-knowledge, aware of things that don’t matter and untroubled by them. –loc 624

By doing something repeatedly, though, and understanding it, you can diffuse and defuse the fear. This is true for sailing, riding motorcycles, asking girls out—even getting hit in the face by a man who wants to kill you. –loc 656

It captured the idea that life is born of struggle and striving, that true joy and understanding do not come from comfort and safety; they come from epiphany born in exhaustion (and not exhaustion for its own sake). Safety and comfort are mortal danger to the soul. –loc 698

If only I could find a way to get it to pay for itself—that’s how I had done all my traveling before. It’s a part of my philosophy: You can always get it to pay for itself somehow. –loc 703

You have a specific responsibility to existence, to God if you like, to taste, touch, and smell what there is to experience. You have to do everything. If given an option between doing something and not doing it, you have to do it; because you’ve already done the “not do it” part. –loc 714

All of the old gods required sacrifice, forms of which exist today: Thus the ritual of sacrifice reveals an almost universal attribute of the archaic deity to whom sacrifices are offered: He or she is a carnivore. –loc 1156

“Truth in observation, that’ll win a fight,” he said. –loc 1335

But I fell back on those immortal words at the base of all good decision making: Fuck it. –loc 1448

I think I have a fatal flaw; when I get hit, I just want to hit back, without rhyme or reason. –loc 1555

“Do you ever watch animals, horses and cows and birds?” asked Darryl’s father, a tall, thick, distinguished man with an open, handsome face and gray hair. He made the motions of jostling his elbows for space, for position. “It’s natural, everything fights.” –loc 1807

“You have to learn from everybody, and stay open-minded, learn and watch carefully: Observation is critical. Watch how they grip. Guys who have been to a lot of different schools are very good because they learn so many different techniques. Now there is so much interchange that we have a lot of broad innovation and spreading ideas.” –loc 2105

Being willing to lose is important, to take risks, to find new ways of doing things; I’ve heard this again and again from different fighters. –loc 2108

You know only 5 percent of what there is to know. Fight your own pride and ego and be open-minded and always learning new techniques, new things from anyone. –loc 2231

Love has given him belief in himself. It’s what makes a dog fight past forty-five minutes. Love is what makes us great, and this display of strength, heart, and love is what brings us all to the fights. –loc 2644

I quickly came to understand one of Virgil’s governing precepts, which is fight when it’s good for you. Don’t stand and fight when your opponent wants to. Move around—fight only when it’s better for you. Muhammad Ali’s first fight with Floyd Patterson is a perfect example. Ali just kept moving and moving and moving, and every now and again paused to hit Floyd, and then moved some more. Boxing critics hated him for it, the “cowardice” of it, but it was unbeatable. Floyd didn’t have an answer. –loc 2936

Afterward, as I was taking off my wraps, Virgil said, “Fundamentals, Sam, fundamentals. If you don’t have them, you will run into somebody else’s.” –loc 2948

“Don’t let me rush you. Wait for things to be right, be deliberate. You don’t want to be flying down the freeway so fast you can’t see the scenery, because you’ll miss your exit. I’ll try and hurry you up, but don’t let me, stay within yourself, within what you want to do, and wait for the opening.” –loc 3187

Look strong when you are weak, Virgil would counsel. –loc 3421

After the fight, Mike said that his ferocity was all gone, he couldn’t even kill the bugs in his house. He had completely lost the killer instinct in the sixth round. “At one point, I thought life was about acquiring things,” he said. “Life is totally about losing everything.” –loc 3587

I was a big fan of something the English call the “wind-up.” You play someone very seriously with something you know will make them crazy, just to get them to lose composure. I’ve seen him do it to little boys who come into the gym. “Oh, I heard about you, you were the one crying when that Korean kid stole your bike,” and the little boy will be raging, “That wasn’t me!” Virgil used to do that at the juvenile hall with young toughs in front of their friends. The –loc 3877

A woman walked by, and Virgil talked about the sound of her footsteps. “I listen to people walk,” he said. “That can tell you a lot.” –loc 4126

“By becoming aware, you can understand that there is no ownership of body or mind, that thoughts are just illusions, and that suffering can be overcome.” –loc 4278

“Pain is a friend. It is a reminder to mindfulness, and it tells us in the end that it is only pain, another illusion, and this helps our understanding.” –loc 4311

“Mindfulness can be brought to bear on everything, can be a part of everything, of your training, and of your fighting,” Ajahn told me. The monks had no trouble at all with the fact that I was a sometime fighter. “If you are mindful in boxing, then you can be aware and not trapped in a same movement, you can be formless, and formless can not be beat—as long as you are strong inside and have your feet rooted,” Ajahn said. Virgil would have agreed with him. –loc 4462

“Mindfulness will help you see without illusion.” –loc 4467

I had a professor once tell me that man cannot view himself clearly; only less complicated organisms can be completely understood. –loc 4852

The appreciation of gameness, then, is probably both cultural and biological. The love of aggression, a willingness to fight regardless of safety or consequences, is a biological key to success, to domination. –loc 4864

There comes a moment when we stop creating ourselves. —John Updike –loc 5314

Michael Kimmel, in his book Manhood in America, talks about the “homosociality” of the manly arenas (sports, business); for a man, the most important thing is “his reputation as a man among men.” –loc 5342

Kimmel writes that for men, one of the deepest fears is that “others will see us as less than manly, as weak, timid, frightened.” –loc 5417

manhood, that endless test, is a sham, an illusion of sorts; because when you start fighting, you realize there’s never an end to it, there’s always somebody better—stronger, faster, bigger, younger, whatever, something. –loc 5441

Having a fighter’s heart, having gameness, is about knowing yourself and not being afraid of losing. You become a better version of yourself. Nobility is a by-product of that attitude, just like love is a byproduct of aggression. –loc 5498

Cormac McCarthy wrote a book called Blood Meridian in which the character of the judge makes an argument that war is the most essential of human activities. He starts by saying that men are born for games, and that everybody, even children, know that “play is nobler than work.” If that is true, says the judge, then what changes the quality of the game but the stakes? And what could be a more valuable stake than your life? So war, the game you play with your life, is the greatest of human endeavors. –loc 5508

I do not believe that men were meant for games, that that is their highest purpose. Work is nobler than play. I believe that men were meant for work, that their highest calling is to build, not destroy or even protect. Learning to fight, trying to embody the virtues of the hunter and warrior—these things are useful and important, even essential. But don’t be content with being a warrior, be a builder as well. Make something. The true calling of man, real manhood, is about creation, not destruction, and everyone secretly knows it. –loc 5516

Every love can be merciless. –loc 5566

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Gratitude

Author: Oliver Sacks
Rating: 10/10
Last Read: July 2016

Quick Summary: A short selection of four essays written by Dr. Oliver Sacks.  These essays cover the end of his life, with reflections on old age, facing mortality, and the gratitude he has for being a sentient being on this planet.  

“Whatever must have a beginning must have an ending.”

Recommended Reads: On the Move (autobiography), On Death and Dying

My Takeaways

You never quite lose the sense of childish wonder if you keep that attitude about you as you grow older.

There really is an essential truth to the matter of dying: when it comes time for you to accept your fate, the nonessential falls away and you focus on the truly important things.  

It is possible to meet death with dignity and grace.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

My Highlights

A few years ago, when I gave a friend a bottle of mercury for his eightieth birthday—a special bottle that could neither leak nor break—he gave me a peculiar look, but later sent me a charming letter in which he joked, “I take a little every morning for my health.” –loc 80

Eighty! I can hardly believe it. I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over. –loc 83

I thought I would die at forty-one, when I had a bad fall and broke a leg while mountaineering alone. I splinted the leg as best I could and started to lever myself down the mountain, clumsily, with my arms. In the long hours that followed, I was assailed by memories, both good and bad. Most were in a mode of gratitude—gratitude for what I had been given by others, gratitude too that I had been able to give something back. –loc 86

I am sorry I have wasted (and still waste) so much time; I am sorry to be as agonizingly shy at eighty as I was at twenty; I am sorry that I speak no languages but my mother tongue and that I have not traveled or experienced other cultures as widely as I should have done. –loc 96

At eighty, the specter of dementia or stroke looms. A third of one’s contemporaries are dead, and many more, with profound mental or physical damage, are trapped in a tragic and minimal existence. At eighty, the marks of decay are all too visible. One’s reactions are a little slower, names more frequently elude one, and one’s energies must be husbanded, but even so, one may often feel full of energy and life and not at all “old.” Perhaps, with luck, I will make it, more or less intact, for another few years and be granted the liberty to continue to love and work, the two most important things, Freud insisted, in life. –loc 105

When pressed about his diagnosis a few weeks later, he said, “Whatever has a beginning must have an ending.” When he died, at eighty-eight, he was still fully engaged in his most creative work. –loc 112

He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’ too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty. At eighty, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was forty or sixty. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together. –loc 115

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. –loc 134

And yet, one line from Hume’s essay strikes me as especially true: “It is difficult,” he wrote, “to be more detached from life than I am at present.” Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life. On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight. –loc 147

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work, and my friends. I shall no longer look at the NewsHour every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming. –loc 153

My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate—the genetic and neural fate—of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death. –loc 159

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. –loc 163

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure. –loc 165

It was this celestial splendor that suddenly made me realize how little time, how little life, I had left. My sense of the heavens’ beauty, of eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience—and death. –loc 191

(Auden used to say that one should always celebrate one’s birthday, no matter how one felt.) –loc 215

“The observance of the Sabbath is extremely beautiful,” he said, “and is impossible without being religious. It is not even a question of improving society—it is about improving one’s own quality of life.” –loc 301

Robert John visited. He was full of entertaining stories about the Nobel Prize and the ceremony in Stockholm, but made a point of saying that, had he been compelled to travel to Stockholm on a Saturday, he would have refused the prize. His commitment to the Sabbath, its utter peacefulness and remoteness from worldly concerns, would have trumped even a Nobel. –loc 307

The peace of the Sabbath, of a stopped world, a time outside time, was palpable, infused everything, and I found myself drenched with a wistfulness, something akin to nostalgia, wondering what if: What if A and B and C had been different? –loc 324

And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life—achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest. –loc 333

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On the Move

Author: Oliver Sacks
Rating: 9/10
Last Read: September 2015

Quick Summary:  Autobiography of the late Dr. Oliver Sacks, writing about his career, growth, struggles, and thoughts as he revisited his life. Dr. Sacks is a wise man who has been through much in life – and there is much humanity to be gleaned from the pages of this book.

I recommend Maria Popova’s review.

Recommended Reads: Gratitude

My Takeaways

Life was (and probably still is) very difficult for LGBT individuals in ways that I have not considered.

The history of a thing is just as important as the recent developments.  It is hard to continue forward if you are not sure where you came from.

Everybody has their struggles, and even those who have achieved much in life struggle in ways you wouldn’t expect – such as being addicted to amphetamines.

As Dr. Sacks recounts a tale of Einstein and humanity, so to does he reveal his humanity by giving a frank and honest recounting of his life.

Aubrey recounted with a smile, he and a colleague from the Israeli consulate visited Einstein in his house in Princeton. Einstein invited them in and courteously asked if they would like coffee, and (thinking that an assistant or housekeeper would make it), Aubrey said yes. But he was “horrified,” as he put it, when Einstein trotted into the kitchen himself. They soon heard the clatter of cups and pots and an occasional piece of crockery falling, as the great man, in his friendly but slightly clumsy way, made the coffee for them. This, more than anything, Aubrey said, showed him the human and endearing side of the world’s greatest genius.

My Highlights

We think of science as discovery, art as invention, but is there a “third world” of mathematics, which is somehow, mysteriously, both? –loc 295

one day, with my heart in my mouth, I told Richard that I was in love with him, not knowing how he would react. He hugged me, gripped my shoulders, and said, “I know. I am not that way, but I appreciate your love and love you too, in my own way.” –loc 343

“Travel now by all means—if you have the time. But travel the right way, the way I travel. I am always reading and thinking of the history and geography of a place. I see its people in terms of these, placed in the social framework of time and space. Take the prairies, for example; you’re wasting your time visiting these unless you know the saga of the homesteaders, the influence of law and religion at different times, the economic problems, the difficulties of communication, and the effects of successive mineral finds. –loc 708

When you were born, people congratulated us on what they considered a wonderful family of four sons! Where are you all now? I feel lonely and bereft. Ghosts inhabit this house. When I go into the various rooms I feel overcome with a sense of loss. –loc 779

These and a host of other memories of your vital personality will always remain with us. When we contemplate this large empty house, we feel a wrench at our heart and a deep sense of loss. We realize nevertheless that you have to make your way in the world, and with you must rest the ultimate decision! –loc 786

I wondered whether systems in the brain concerned with the perception (or projection) of meaning, significance, and intentionality, systems underlying a sense of wonder and mysteriousness, systems for appreciation of the beauty of art and science, had lost their balance in schizophrenia, producing a mental world overcharged with intense emotion and distortions of reality. These systems had lost their middle ground, it seemed, so that any attempt to titrate them, damp them down, could tip the person from a pathologically heightened state to one of great dullness, a sort of mental death. –loc 884

It was at Mount Zion that Libet performed his astounding experiments showing that if subjects were asked to make a fist or perform another voluntary action, their brains would register a “decision” nearly half a second before there was any conscious decision to act. While his subjects felt that they had consciously and of their own free will made a movement, their brains had made a decision, seemingly, long before they did. –loc 1302

I sometimes annoyed the group, I think, by saying that we should also discuss the writings of our nineteenth-century forebears, relating what we were seeing in patients to their observations and thoughts. This was seen by the others as archaism; we were short of time, and we had better things to do than consider such “obsolete” matters. This attitude was reflected, implicitly, in many of the journal articles we read; they made little reference to anything more than five years old. It was as if neurology had no history. –loc 1379

I found this dismaying, for I think in narrative and historical terms. As a chemistry-mad boy, I devoured books on the history of chemistry, the evolution of its ideas, and the lives of my favorite chemists. Chemistry had, for me, a historical and human dimension too. –loc 1383

I was not a book collector myself, and when I bought books or articles, it was to read them, not to show them. –loc 1392

I felt that I was enjoying California too much, was getting addicted to an easy, sleazy life, to say nothing of a deepening drug addiction. I felt I needed to go to a hard, real place, a place where I could devote myself to work and perhaps discover or create a real identity, a voice of my own. –loc 1760

I sometimes wonder why I have spent more than fifty years in New York, when it was the West, and especially the Southwest, which so enthralled me. I now have many ties in New York—to my patients, my students, my friends, and my analyst—but I have never felt it move me the way California did. I suspect my nostalgia may be not only for the place itself but for youth, and a very different time, and being in love, and being able to say, “The future is before me.” –loc 1773

But then the feeling started to fade. We asked ourselves whether the experience we had shared was real, authentic, given the huge aphrodisiac thrust of the amphetamines. I found this question particularly humiliating—could so lofty a transport as falling in love be reduced to something purely physiological? –loc 1908

I asked Shengold if I too was schizophrenic. “No,” he answered. Was I then, I asked, “merely neurotic”? “No,” he answered. I left it there, we left it there, and there it has been left for the last forty-nine years. –loc 1982

I would continue to seek satisfaction in drugs, I felt, unless I had satisfying—and, hopefully, creative—work. It was crucial for me to find something with meaning, and this, for me, was seeing patients. –loc 1987

We maintain the proprieties—he is always “Dr. Shengold,” and I am always “Dr. Sacks”—but it is because the proprieties are there that there can be such freedom of communication. And this is something I also feel with my own patients. They can tell me things, and I can ask things, which would be impermissible in ordinary social intercourse. –loc 2000

Above all, Dr. Shengold has taught me about paying attention, listening to what lies beyond consciousness or words. –loc 2002

For me, this was an example of how unconscious motives may sometimes ally themselves to physiological propensities, of how one cannot abstract an ailment or its treatment from the whole pattern, the context, the economy of someone’s life. –loc 2028

This painful story—painful on both sides—is not an uncommon one: an older man, a father figure, and his youthful son-in-science find their roles reversed when the son starts to outshine the father. This happened with Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday—Davy first giving every encouragement to Faraday, then trying to block his career. I am no Faraday, and Friedman was no Davy, but I think the same deadly dynamic was at work, at a much humbler level. –loc 2143

I did not feel she used the word “Darling” lightly; I felt very loved by her, and I loved her intensely too, and this was a love without ambivalence, without conditionality. Nothing I could say could repel or shock her; there seemed no limit to her powers of sympathy and understanding, the generosity and spaciousness of her heart. –loc 2169

I mentioned to her, a couple of months later, that I had been in a depression. “I know we all suffer them at times,” Len wrote. “Well, don’t have any more. You’ve got so much in your favour—brains, charm, presentability, a sense of the ridiculous, and a whole gaggle of us who believe in you.” –loc 2220

“Your Dr. Friedman,” she wrote in October of 1967, “sounds a most unpleasant piece of work, but don’t let him get under your skin. Keep hold of your faith in yourself.” –loc 2255

As one grows older, the years seem to blur into one another, but 1972 remains sharply etched in my memory. –loc 2500

It seems to me that I discover my thoughts through the act of writing, in the act of writing. Occasionally, a piece comes out perfectly, but more often my writings need extensive pruning and editing, because I may express the same thought in many different ways. –loc 2581

As the decorous stranger discreetly retired, I asked Wystan how he experienced the world, whether he thought of it as being a very small or very large place. “Neither,” he replied. “Neither large nor small. Cozy, cozy.” He added in an undertone, “Like home.” –loc 2708

Informally (I sometimes think) I see and learn and do a great deal, with the extremely varied patients I see in various clinics and Homes, and every seeing-and-learning-and-doing situation is, eo ipso, a teaching situation. I find every patient I see, everywhere, vividly alive, interesting and rewarding; I have never seen a patient who didn’t teach me something new, or stir in me new feelings and new trains of thought; and I think that those who are with me in these situations share in, and contribute to, this sense of adventure. (I regard all neurology, everything, as a sort of adventure!) –loc 3130

“You care, you really care for me!” “Of course,” Eric said. “How could you doubt it?” But it was not easy to believe that anyone cared for me; I sometimes failed to realize, I think, how much my parents cared for me. It is only now, reading the letters they wrote to me when I came to America fifty years ago, that I see how deeply they did care. –loc 3232

And perhaps how deeply many others have cared for me—was the imagined lack of caring by others a projection of something deficient or inhibited in myself? –loc 3235

When Lennie learned of this, she felt that life with intravenous nourishment and a spreading cancer was not worthwhile. She resolved to stop eating, though she would take water. My father insisted she be seen by a psychiatrist, but the psychiatrist said, “She is the sanest person I have ever seen. You must respect her decision.” –loc 3246

Dearest Len, We have all of us been hoping so intensely that this month would see your return to health; but, alas! this was not to be. My heart is torn when I hear of your weakness, your misery—and, now, your longing to die. You, who have always loved life, and been such a source of strength and life to so many, can face death, even choose it, with serenity and courage, mixed, of course, with the grief of all passing. We, I, can much less bear the thought of losing you. You have been as dear to me as anyone in this world. I shall hope against hope that you may weather this misery, and be restored again to the joy of full living. But if this is not to be, I must thank you—thank you, once again, and for the last time, for living—for being you. Love, Oliver –loc 3254

When I visited Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., (it is the only university in the world for deaf and hearing-impaired students) and talked about the “hearing impaired,” one of the deaf students signed, “Why don’t you look at yourself as sign impaired?” –loc 3605

He has one of the most spacious, thoughtful minds I have ever encountered, with a vast base of knowledge of every sort, but it is a base under continual questioning and scrutiny. (I have seen him suddenly stop in mid-sentence and say, “I no longer believe what I was about to say.”) –loc 3697

I think we all live in a swirl of anecdotes…. We (most of us) compose our lives into narratives…. I wonder what the origin is of the urge to “compose” oneself. –loc 3781

I found you so talented, but so deficient in one quality—just the most important quality—call it humanity, or sympathy, or something like that. And, frankly, I despaired of your ever becoming a good writer, because I didn’t see how one could be taught such a quality…. Your deficiency of sympathy made for a limitation of your observation…. What I didn’t know was that the growth of sympathies is something frequently delayed till one’s thirties. –loc 3826

I am however a rather derivative poet. I learn what I can from whom I can. I borrow heavily from my reading, because I take my reading seriously. It is part of my total experience and I base most of my poetry on my experience. –loc 3857

There is a danger, when old friends meet, that they will talk mostly of the past. –loc 3860

At worst, one is in motion; and at best, Reaching no absolute, in which to rest, One is always nearer by not keeping still. –loc 3866

Aubrey recounted with a smile, he and a colleague from the Israeli consulate visited Einstein in his house in Princeton. Einstein invited them in and courteously asked if they would like coffee, and (thinking that an assistant or housekeeper would make it), Aubrey said yes. But he was “horrified,” as he put it, when Einstein trotted into the kitchen himself. They soon heard the clatter of cups and pots and an occasional piece of crockery falling, as the great man, in his friendly but slightly clumsy way, made the coffee for them. This, more than anything, Aubrey said, showed him the human and endearing side of the world’s greatest genius. –loc 4090

And in its broadest sense, neural Darwinism implies that we are destined, whether we wish it or not, to a life of particularity and self-development, to make our own individual paths through life. –loc 5111

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The Graveyard Book

Author: Neil Gaiman
Rating: 10/10
Last Read: July 2016

Quick Summary: A boy’s family is murdered, and he manages to escape to a graveyard.  The ghosts of the graveyard raise and protect the boy.  Many adventures and childish antics ensue.

I was looking for a book to read that would be relaxing before bed.  After reading the Amazon book summary, I was going to skip over it – the premise seemed cheesy.  I’m glad I decided to give it a whirl – I finished it within the next 24 hours.

My Highlights

A graveyard is not normally a democracy, and yet death is the great democracy, and each of the dead had a voice, and an opinion as to whether the living child should be allowed to stay, and they were each determined to be heard, that night. –loc 333

His guardian was unperturbed. “It is neither fair nor unfair, Nobody Owens. It simply is. –loc 743

“They kill themselves, you mean?” said Bod. He was about eight years old, wide-eyed and inquisitive, and he was not stupid. “Indeed.” “Does it work? Are they happier dead?” “Sometimes. Mostly, no. It’s like the people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean.” –loc 1222

The dance sped up, and the dancers with it. Bod was breathless, but he could not imagine the dance ever stopping: the Macabray, the dance of the living and the dead, the dance with Death. –loc 1960

Fear is contagious. You can catch it. Sometimes all it takes is for someone to say that they’re scared for the fear to become real. Mo was terrified, and now Nick was too. –loc 2277

At the best of times his face was unreadable. Now his face was a book written in a language long forgotten, in an alphabet unimagined. Silas wrapped the shadows around him like a blanket, and stared after the way the boy had gone, and did not move to follow. –loc 2358

“The dead dun’t disappoint you. They’ve had their life, done what they’ve done. We dun’t change. The living, they always disappoint you, dun’t they? You meet a boy who’s all brave and noble, and he grows up to run away.” –loc 2403

Thackeray Porringer was Bod’s height and age, and seemed to be in much better temper with him; he would walk with Bod in the evenings, and tell stories of unfortunate things that had happened to his friends. Normally the stories would end in the friends being hanged until they were dead for no offense of theirs and by mistake, although sometimes they were simply transported to the American Colonies and they didn’t have to be hanged unless they came back. –loc 2809

And then, with a hopeful whine, WILL YOU BE OUR MASTER? “I’m afraid not.” IF YOU WERE OUR MASTER, WE COULD HOLD YOU IN OUR COILS FOREVER. IF YOU WERE OUR MASTER, WE WOULD KEEP YOU SAFE AND PROTECT YOU UNTIL THE END OF TIME AND NEVER LET YOU ENDURE THE DANGERS OF THE WORLD. “I am not your master.” NO. Bod felt the Sleer writhing through his mind. It said, THEN FIND YOUR NAME. –loc 3104

Jack nodded thoughtfully. “If this is true,” said Jack, “and if I am now a Jack-all-alone, then I have an excellent reason for killing you both.” Bod said nothing. “Pride,” said the man Jack. “Pride in my work. Pride in finishing what I began.” –loc 3503

“How could you make her forget me?” Silas said, “People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.” –loc 3646

“I called you boy, didn’t I? But time passes in the blink of an eye, and it’s a young man you are now, isn’t it? How old are you?” “About fifteen, I think. Though I still feel the same as I always did,” Bod said, but Mother Slaughter interrupted, “And I still feels like I done when I was a tiny slip of a thing, making daisy chains in the old pasture. You’re always you, and that don’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” –loc 3732

Bod said, “I want to see life. I want to hold it in my hands. I want to leave a footprint on the sand of a desert island. I want to play football with people. I want,” he said, and then he paused and he thought. “I want everything.” –loc 3828

“Sleep my little babby- / oh Sleep until you waken / When you wake you’ll see the world / If I’m not mistaken… / Kiss a lover / Dance a measure, / Find your name / And buried treasure…” Then the last lines of the song came back to Mistress Owens, and she sang them to her son. “Face your life / Its pain, its pleasure, / Leave no path untaken” –loc 3855

“Leave no path untaken,” repeated Bod. “A difficult challenge, but I can try my best.”

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Into the Wild

Author: Jon Krakauer
Rating: 6/10
Last Read: August 2010

Quick Summary: A young man decides to give it all up and go wander the world.  He dies in the Alaskan wilderness.  

There have been lots of debates about the death of Chris McCandless, many complaining that the more likely case is starvation (rather than poisoning).  Krakauer recently commented on this as well.  Either way, people like to debate endlessly about whether McCandless is a falsely glorified idiot or not.  

The book is interesting – and if you have a soul full of wanderlust you can appreciate his drive.  But I wouldn’t call it a must-read.

My Highlights

I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life. LEO TOLSTOY, “FAMILY HAPPINESS”

I’d like to repeat the advice I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.

“Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.”

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, an obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board. The hospitality was as cold as the ices. HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN, OR LIFE IN THE WOODS

For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy. G. K. CHESTERTON

Children can be harsh judges when it comes to their parents,Read more

It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.

Next to “And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness…. And this was most vexing of all,” he noted, “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.”

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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Author: Hunter S. Thompson
Rating: 7/10
Last Read: July 2016

Quick Summary: A journalist and his “lawyer” go on a five day drug binge and attempt to cover stories in Las Vegas.  Lots of “what the fuck” moments abound – you can’t take your eyes from the page. 

Quick read.  

The book is 70% descriptions of drug usage and effects of drugs.  If drugs aren’t your cup of tea… you should probably just skip over this one.

My Takeaways

Vegas is a very bad place to take hallucinogens.

Don’t mix your drugs.

My Highlights

In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.

After a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run … but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.…

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The Book Thief

Author: Markus Zusak
Rating: 7/10
Last Read: January 2015

Quick Summary: The story of a small girl living in Germany during WWII.  Particularly interesting because the narrator is Death. She is taught to read by her foster father and steals books from the Nazi regime. Her family takes in a Jewish man.  Horror and sadness ensue all around.

 

I have hated the words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.

My Highlights

He was the crazy one who had painted himself black and defeated the world. She was the book thief without the words. Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like the rain.

It’s very rare, don’t you think, for a statue to appear before its subject has become famous.

“After all,” he said, “you should know it yourself—a young man is still a boy, and a boy sometimes has the right to be stubborn.”

“The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it’s stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun is like a yellow hole ….” Max, at that moment, knew that only a child could have given him a weather report like that.

You might well ask just what the hell he was thinking. The answer is, probably nothing at all. He’d probably say that he was exercising his God-given right to stupidity.

When the elderly Jew climbed to his feet for the last time and continued on, he looked briefly back. He took a last sad glance at the man who was kneeling now himself, whose back was burning with four lines of fire, whose knees were aching on the road. If nothing else, the old man would die like a human. Or at least with the thought that he was a human.

Now more than ever, 33 Himmel Street was a place of silence, and it did not go unnoticed that the Duden Dictionary was completely and utterly mistaken, especially with its related words. Silence was not quiet or calm, and it was not peace.

The accordion remained strapped to her chest. When she bowed her head, it sank to her lap. Liesel watched. She knew that for the next few days, Mama would be walking around with the imprint of an accordion on her body. There was also an acknowledgment that there was great beauty in what she was currently witnessing, and she chose not to disturb it.

THE BEST word shakers were the ones who understood the true power of words. They were the ones who could climb the highest. One such word shaker was a small, skinny girl. She was renowned as the best word shaker of her region because she knew how powerless a person could be WITHOUT words.

I have hated the words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.

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Invisible Cities

Author: Italo Calvino
Rating: 7/10
Last Read: May 2016

Quick Summary: A collection of short “stories” told by  Marco Polo about cities he has visited.  These are poetic, fantastical descriptions of unreal places, usually highlighting an individual aspect of life in a city.

The book is interesting, though it took me quite a while to get into it – there’s no easing you into the strangeness that you will encounter.

This is definitely a book you can revisit and appreciate further, I think.

My Highlights

In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. –loc 67

As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls. –loc 107

You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger’s passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are. –loc 122

The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things: –loc 125

But in vain I set out to visit the city: forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her. –loc 150

Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes; and so the camel driver and the sailor see Despina, a border city between two deserts. –loc 163

The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind. –loc 168

Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms. –loc 203

the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; –loc 222

At this point Kublai Khan interrupted him or imagined interrupting him, or Marco Polo imagined himself interrupted, with a question such as: “You advance always with your head turned back?” or “Is what you see always behind you?” or rather, “Does your journey take place only in the past?” –loc 225

traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places. –loc 230

And Marco’s answer was: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.” –loc 240

It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one. –loc 253

It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it. –loc 285

“Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.” –loc 368

In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping. –loc 392

“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” –loc 639

“You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.” –loc 695

The Great Khan tried to concentrate on the game: but now it was the game’s reason that eluded him. The end of every game is a gain or a loss: but of what? What were the real stakes? At checkmate, beneath the foot of the king, knocked aside by the winner’s hand, nothingness remains: a black square, or a white one. By disembodying bis conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which the empire’s multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes; it was reduced to a square of planed wood. –loc 964

“I speak and speak,” Marco says, “but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. –loc 987

“Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name.” –loc 1012

Cities have no name for me: they are places without leaves, separating one pasture from another, and where the goats are frightened at street corners and scatter. The dog and I run to keep the flock together.” –loc 1134

“The places have mingled,” the goatherd said. “Cecilia is everywhere. Here, once upon a time, there must have been the Meadow of the Low Sage. My goats recognize the grass on the traffic island.” –loc 1145

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” –loc 1243

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Into Thin Air

Author: Jon Krakauer
Rating: 8/10
Last Read: March 2016

Quick Summary: A retelling of a tragic Everest expedition which claimed the lives of multiple experienced mountaineers and clients.

Key Takeaways

Ego will get you killed.

Mountains are dangerous places.  Even experienced mountaineers make mistakes, which cost them their lives or the lives of others. Altitude does not make decision making easier.

Climbing at altitude is not fun, in the traditional sense.

There were many, many fine reasons not to go, but attempting to climb Everest is an intrinsically irrational act—a triumph of desire over sensibility. Any person who would seriously consider it is almost by definition beyond the sway of reasoned argument.

My Highlights

The staggering unreliability of the human mind at high altitude made the research problematic. –loc 146

There were many, many fine reasons not to go, but attempting to climb Everest is an intrinsically irrational act—a triumph of desire over sensibility. Any person who would seriously consider it is almost by definition beyond the sway of reasoned argument. –loc 158

The plain truth is that I knew better but went to Everest anyway. And in doing so I was a party to the death of good people, which is something that is apt to remain on my conscience for a very long time. –loc 160

As I gazed across the sky at this contrail, it occurred to me that the top of Everest was precisely the same height as the pressurized jet bearing me through the heavens. That I proposed to climb to the cruising altitude of an Airbus 300 jetliner struck me, at that moment, as preposterous, or worse. My palms felt clammy. –loc 622

There was loneliness, too, as the sun set, but only rarely now did doubts return. Then I felt sinkingly as if my whole life lay behind me. Once on the mountain I knew (or trusted) that this would give way to total absorption with the task at hand. But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind. –loc 763

The more improbable the situation and the greater the demands made on [the climber], the more sweetly the blood flows later in release from all that tension. The possibility of danger serves merely to sharpen his awareness and control. And perhaps this is the rationale of all risky sports: You deliberately raise the ante of effort and concentration in order, as it were, to clear your mind of trivialities. It’s a small scale model for living, but with a difference: Unlike your routine life, where mistakes can usually be recouped and some kind of compromise patched up, your actions, for however brief a period, are deadly serious. A. Alvarez The Savage God: A Study of Suicide –loc 1221

Eighteen days earlier she’d broken into tears when she’d taken me to the plane to Nepal. “Driving home from the airport,” she confessed, “I couldn’t stop crying. Saying good-bye to you was one of the saddest things I’ve ever done. I guess I knew on some level that you might not be coming back, and it seemed like such a waste. It seemed so fucking stupid and pointless.” –loc 1373

Ms. O’Dowd walked to the team’s Sherpa leader, Ang Dorje, and said audibly: “This is Ken Vernon, one of the ones we told you about. He is to be given no assistance whatsoever.” Ang Dorje is a tough, nuggety rock of a man and we had already shared several glasses of Chang, the fiery local brew. I looked at him and said, “Not even a cup of tea?” To his credit, and in the best tradition of Sherpa hospitality, he looked at Ms. O’Dowd and said: “Bullshit.” He grabbed me by the arm, dragged me into the mess tent and served up a mug of steaming tea and a plate of biscuits. –loc 1605

I doubt if anyone would claim to enjoy life at high altitudes—enjoy, that is, in the ordinary sense of the word. There is a certain grim satisfaction to be derived from struggling upwards, however slowly; but the bulk of one’s time is necessarily spent in the extreme squalor of a high camp, when even this solace is lacking. –loc 1636

worst of all is the feeling of complete helplessness and inability to deal with any emergency that might arise. I used to try to console myself with the thought that a year ago I would have been thrilled by the very idea of taking part in our present adventure, a prospect that had then seemed like an impossible dream; but altitude has the same effect on the mind as upon the body, one’s intellect becomes dull and unresponsive, and my only desire was to finish the wretched job and to get down to a more reasonable clime. –loc 1642

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Joan Didion –loc 1933

Now I dream of the soft touch of women, the songs of birds, the smell of soil crumbling between my fingers, and the brilliant green of plants that I diligently nurture. I am looking for land to buy and I will sow it with deer and wild pigs and birds and cottonwoods and sycamores and build a pond and the ducks will come and fish will rise in the early evening light and take the insects into their jaws. There will be paths through this forest and you and I will lose ourselves in the soft curves and folds of the ground. We will come to the water’s edge and lie on the grass and there will be a small, unobtrusive sign that says, THIS IS THE REAL WORLD, MUCHACHOS, AND WE ARE ALL IN IT. –loc 4074

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Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

Author: James Romm
Rating: 9/10
Last Read: January 2016

Quick Summary: An overview of the life of Seneca, putting his philosophical works into context with his life and surroundings.  Discusses palace intrigues with the emperor Nero.

If you like history or philosophy, it is an excellent read.

Life, properly regarded, is only a journey toward death. We wrongly say that the old and sick are “dying,” when infants and youths are doing so just as certainly. We are dying every day, all of us

Key Takeaways

Nothing is created in a vacuum.  Seneca’s letters are a source of immense wisdom still today… but when added into the context of his life, his goals, and his aspirations they can take on a totally different slant.

Nothing can be proven, but the theory fits with a pattern of opportunism in much of Seneca’s work. His command of the written word was so deft, his rhetorical skills so subtle, that it was easy for him to help himself while also helping others.

History is super fucking interesting and way better than anything we can make up.  

Elsewhere in De Ira Seneca calls to mind the sufferings of Asian viziers in old Greek legends. Harpagus served as chief minister to a Persian king but offended his master by disregarding an order. The king took a gory revenge: he served Harpagus a stew of his own children’s flesh, then showed him the severed heads to reveal what he had eaten. How did Harpagus like his dinner? the king asked, with Caligulan cruelty. Harpagus’ choking reply was “At a king’s table, every meal is pleasant.” The flattery at least gained him this, Seneca says grimly: he did not have to finish his meal.

My Highlights

Amici vitia si feras, facias tua. If you put up with the crimes of a friend, you make them your own. —ROMAN PROVERB –loc 47

Consolation to Marcia, written about A.D. 40, takes the form of a letter addressed to a mother grieving for a dead son, but it was meant to be read widely. Seneca would play the same rhetorical trick his entire life, allowing his readers to listen in on what seemed to be an intimate exchange. –loc 306

Nothing can be proven, but the theory fits with a pattern of opportunism in much of Seneca’s work. His command of the written word was so deft, his rhetorical skills so subtle, that it was easy for him to help himself while also helping others. –loc 324

Marcia’s grief, for Seneca, exemplifies a universal human blindness. We assume that we own things—family, wealth, position—whereas we have only borrowed them from Fortune. We take for granted that they will be with us forever, and we grieve at their loss; but loss is the more normal event—it is what we should have expected all along. –loc 336

life, properly regarded, is only a journey toward death. We wrongly say that the old and sick are “dying,” when infants and youths are doing so just as certainly. We are dying every day, all of us. –loc 343

Not only in Rome, but everywhere and in all times, good men have knuckled under to despots. –loc 410

Elsewhere in De Ira Seneca calls to mind the sufferings of Asian viziers in old Greek legends. Harpagus served as chief minister to a Persian king but offended his master by disregarding an order. The king took a gory revenge: he served Harpagus a stew of his own children’s flesh, then showed him the severed heads to reveal what he had eaten. How did Harpagus like his dinner? the king asked, with Caligulan cruelty. Harpagus’ choking reply was “At a king’s table, every meal is pleasant.” The flattery at least gained him this, Seneca says grimly: he did not have to finish his meal. –loc 411

Seneca’s hymn to suicide is thus very much of its time. By his day, suicide had come to signify, for aristocratic victims of the emperors, an inability to fight back; the best one could hope for was to embarrass the princeps by a highly public exit. –loc 459

Prexaspes was another vizier like Harpagus, a right-hand man to a Persian monarch. His master, Cambyses, a notorious drunk, set out one day to prove to his court that wine did not affect him. He set up an archery course, with Prexaspes’ son as the target; then, good as his word, he shot the boy through the heart. The story is related in De Ira just before the hymn to suicide above (in which Prexaspes is recalled as “the man whom it befell to have a king shoot arrows at his dear ones”). But Seneca leaves the sequel to the story curiously untold. Years later Prexaspes found himself in possession of dangerous information. He knew that a group of plotters had murdered Cambyses’ heir and put an impostor on the throne. He had colluded with the plot’s leaders, who valued his high standing among the Persian people. When the people became uneasy about their king’s legitimacy, the plotters asked Prexaspes to reassure them. Prexaspes climbed a high tower in a central square of the capital. From a window at the top, he called out to the populace below—but not as instructed. He denounced the impostor and revealed the plot, confessing that he himself had killed the true heir to the throne, on Cambyses’ orders. Then he launched himself off the tower and fell to his death. Inspired by his deed, the Persians rallied against the conspirators and soon overthrew them and their false king. –loc 463

Was life under such arbitrary power worth living? It was the question Seneca had posed in De Ira and, in a different way, in Consolation to Marcia. For Lucius Junius Silanus, the answer—no—was clear enough. Three days after his dismissal, on the same day Claudius wed Agrippina, he took his own life. –loc 618

As in the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel, the very complexity of civilization seemed to carry the seeds of its own destruction—or at least to have a fixed terminus, reached at a regular point every few thousand years. To Seneca, who lived in a city that had reached unimagined levels of sophistication, that terminus seemed not far off. –loc 633

By a curious coincidence, the careers of these two brothers—Seneca’s older brother Novatus, and Pallas’ brother Antonius Felix—are bound together by an unlikely thread: the travels of the apostle Paul. –loc 843

Only philosophic contemplation, he argues, can fulfill that quest. Only those who study philosophy are truly alive, in that they move outside the prison of time into the realm of eternals. All others, those who follow worldly pursuits, are squandering their time, merely running out the ever-ticking clock of mortality. –loc 972

“To fight against an equal is risky; against a higher-up, insane; against someone beneath you, degrading,” –loc 1202

But De Clementia is more emphatic on this point. “We have all of us done wrong,” Seneca intones here, in words that would not be out of place in a modern Christian sermon, “some seriously, some lightly, some intentionally, some pushed into it by accident or carried away by the wrongdoing of others; some have stood by our good designs not firmly enough and have lost our guiltlessness, unwillingly, while trying to keep our grasp on –loc 1563

Seneca had made the bargain that many good men have made when agreeing to aid bad regimes. On the one hand, their presence strengthens the regime and helps it endure. But their moral influence may also improve the regime’s behavior or save the lives of its enemies. For many, this has been a bargain worth making, even if it has cost them—as it may have cost Seneca—their immortal soul. –loc 2088

According to Seneca’s definition in the treatise, Nero’s giving had been not a beneficium, an act of generosity, but a means of asserting power and imposing obligation. –loc 2200

In the fog-bound glens of eastern England, Boudicca, warrior-queen of the Iceni, was gathering a mighty host determined to end Roman rule. At her hands, more than 80,000 Romans and their allies would soon be killed, and the Roman army would come within a hairsbreadth of an epic disaster. –loc 2206

According to Dio’s account, before the rebellion began, Seneca had called in his loans to British tribal leaders, abruptly and on harsh terms. That put many Britons into bankruptcy, while others were broken by the corrupt finance officer in charge of the region, Decianus Catus. Together, Dio suggests, Catus and Seneca forced Britons into a corner where they had nothing to lose by revolt. Tacitus, by contrast, says nothing of Seneca’s moneylending in Britain, though he confirms that Catus had made enemies there by rapacity. For Tacitus, the principal spark of the conflict was the flogging of Boudicca and the rape of her daughters, committed by arrogant Roman troops grown scornful of British tribesmen. –loc 2246

Then Nero turned to a more salient point. “If you return money to me, it won’t be your moderation spoken of by every mouth, but my greed; if you leave your princeps, it will be chalked up to fear of my cruelty. Your self-restraint would earn great praise; but it doesn’t befit a wise man to get glory for himself while bringing ill repute on a friend.” –loc 2329

The most consequential departure was that of Burrus, the stalwart Praetorian prefect, recently dead. The gruff old soldier had been one of few who stood up to Nero, speaking his mind and then, if asked to reconsider, saying to the princeps: “I’ve told you already, don’t question me twice.” –loc 2452

Discomforts overwhelm the body, Seneca muses, in the same way that vice and ignorance overwhelm the soul. The sufferer may not even know he is suffering, just as a deep sleeper does not know he is asleep. Only philosophy can rouse souls from such comas. –loc 2563

By insisting that death is everywhere and cannot be escaped, Seneca seems to relieve himself of the burden of action. For indeed, Seneca was taking very little action in these years to help himself or others. –loc 2672

The will to power, Atreus implies, lurks in even the most detached, self-contented sage. –loc 2945

Seneca’s prose works offer forgiveness, but in the bleak world of the tragedies, the sin of weakness comes back on the sinner’s head a thousandfold. In a gruesome messenger speech, we hear how Atreus butchered, fileted, and stewed Thyestes’ children. Then we watch as Thyestes unknowingly consumes the horrid casserole. –loc 2964

A great stream of manacled men surged toward Nero’s residence, so many that the suspects had to be detained outside, near the gates, for lack of rooms to torture them in. –loc 3167

Seneca allegedly once told Nero—the occasion of the remark is not known—“No matter how many you kill, you can’t kill your successor.” But in this case, as in many others, Nero proved his teacher wrong. He had indeed eliminated all possible successors, men belonging to the Julian line, by the end of 65. –loc 3376

The power to die, Seneca had promised, was present at every moment and transcended every oppression. –loc 3430

Domitian again, as his father had done, banished the Stoics from Rome, including Epictetus, whose magnetic personality had by now become a phenomenon. Epictetus landed in Nicopolis, in the Greek East, and began attracting new followers. His conversations and quips were written down by one of them, young Arrian of Nicomedia (later a famous historian), and began circulating as the Discourses and Encheiridion (“Handbook”). In time these writings, in Greek, filtered back to Rome, where they came under the eyes of an aristocratic youth named Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. One day, after his elevation to princeps, this Marcus would quote the sayings of Epictetus in his own writings—bringing Stoic philosophy back into the palace from which it had been exiled since the death of Seneca. –loc 3519