a loan

A book can be the difference between writing and not writing, and what a difference that is. Only you can write what you write - that expression of thoughts and experience and inner-world that is yours alone. 

will to appear

I'm nearly finished reading The Vivisector by Patrick White. I really noticed, as I got further into the book, how at times, reading it stopped being an effort and became a kind of experience. It was so compelling and vivid that I wasn't aware of it as a text, and instead I just wanted to see what happened. 

It's like with art how I forget what my hands actually do to create and it's as if I'm just mentally willing the image to appear. 

on the floor

But the problem - the frustrating thing - is not the flaws themselves. The problem is the toll the flaws take on us. The problem is that these flaws cause damage.

exploration

There are certain things that it's good to think about. It's good to think about goals and values. It's good to think about your direction in life because you are the only one who can think about that - it's ultimately your responsibility and yours alone. But the way we think about these things has to change and evolve.

Thinking is hard work. Your mind will always go in the direction it knows - the direction it has gone in the past - the habitual direction you have trained it to take. You can't really see places that you haven't been in your mind. You can't really grasp possibilities that are nothing like the possibilities you've already encountered. You can't learn new things unless there's some link to what you already know - you just won't understand them.

ironic lessons

I've always tended to think that, if I do a good job as a teacher, that's the best thing I can do for my students' learning, and generally I'm sure that's true, but at times I've also thought that, actually, sometimes it may help my students succeed if I fail in some way. Like, if I don't have all the best answers to all the questions. Sometimes if you can struggle and allow students to help you - not just as a pretense, but for real - that's a far better lesson than you lecturing them and seeing yourself as the fount of all wisdom.  

lines and curves

There are few straight lines or uniform curves in nature, but most things that are made by humans are mostly straight lines and uniform curves. That’s a requirement of mass production, but not when God is the creator. God mass produced trees and, though there’s a uniformity about them, no tree is exactly the same as another. The beauty of ruins or their more modern variant — abandoned places — is that they are a collaborative effort between nature and humanity. Humanity builds something with lines and defined edges and then, over time, nature goes to work, eroding the hard lines and introducing an element of chaotic life. 

post hoc ergo propter hoc

I like learning about things in a non-systematic, haphazard way. I do that with programming languages. I'll decide on a particular language and then I'll watch a series of YouTube videos or a course on Udemy or whatever, and even if I've been through that course before I generally start at or near the beginning and rather than follow each lesson through I'll try to anticipate and see if I can figure out how to do the thing. Same with learning about philosophy, which I've been doing for a few months now. I have different books and I watch videos, but I just follow my interest, I don't work systematically.