the source

The young'uns don't know about John Milton, but he's the poet who was revered by all the poets we think of as great - Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley. 

making history

An odyssey is an arduous, long and challenging journey. It's defining features are that it is more arduous, long and challenging than any normal journey. 

We only have that concept because of a poem written by a legend. I'm not using the word 'legend' just as a superlative. Homer is a legend in the sense that we don't know the truth about him. 

too much for the world

The Bell Jar is one of those books that captures beauty and innocence in the midst of destruction. The impression you have afterwards is of something very sweet but dark and traumatic. 

all of our competitions

My favorite Japanese author is Sayaka Murata. I like how she portrays characters that don't buy into the competitions that nearly everyone else seems to. Like, in Convenience Store Woman the main character has no greater ambition than to excel at her job in a convenience store, and she has no desire to get married. 

the ich

Wordsworth invented modern poetry - poetry that is a personal expression of the poet....it's about their thoughts and feelings. We just think that's what poetry or writing in general is, but it wasn't always like that. 

making meaning

Sometimes when I read the Bible, I don't know what is being conveyed - the intended meaning. I could look up a commentary to tell me what it means but I think, in many ways, that defeats the purpose, because I need to draw my own meaning from it. 

portal

One of the great ironies of the 'red pill' is that it comes from a work of fiction - it's made up. 

art

Sometimes I look at my art and think that I wish it looked nicer. It's ugly and messy. Sometimes I think that I really failed. I tried. I know what I was trying to achieve. 

But then another time, sometimes I think something is really great, but it doesn't get many likes, and other times I'll think it's OK, but it gets heaps of likes. 

But I go on making art because I want to. I like Andy Warhol's dictum:

Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.

 

word

I was watching 'Vanilla Sky' with the subtitles on and, where he says, 'I think I've met the one remaining woman in this world who is almost completely guileless', instead of the word 'guileless' - which is crucial for the meaning - the subtitles used the word 'guyless'. 

hands across the water

Faith is like water flowing out of a tap. The stream of water is clearly defined, but you can't grasp it. When you try to grasp it, it changes and ceases to be a stream at all. 

strange

Viktor Shklovsky proposed the idea of 'defamiliarization' to explain how literature works. The idea is that the act of reading slows down your apprehension of the subject, because words are slower than thoughts. That slowing down, makes the subject strange, kind of like when you focus on particular details rather than the whole picture or when you repeat words over and over until they seem weird or nonsensical. 

do the thing

From my own experience and what I've learnt from talented and creative people, I think the most important factor in someone's success in creative endeavors - more important even than talent - is the desire to do the thing. 

nb

I got excited because I was watching a video about Edith Wharton and they said that Edith Wharton hated dusk-jackets (that's what I heard). I thought - finally I've found someone who shares my antipathy. But when I replayed that part of the video, it was talking about how she hated a particular dust-jacket because of something it said.

I feel like, at this stage of my taper, time is on my side in a way. Instead of carrying a weight that just gets heavier over time, it's now getting lighter. 

Marilyn Robinson's book of essays - The Givenness of Things - includes the transcript of a conversation she had with President Obama. 

Pronuncation guide:

Donne = 'dun'

Goethe = 'ger t'

Albert Camus = 'al bear cam moo'

Basquiat = 'bas ki ar'

Guy de Maupassant = 'ghee...' the rest is as you would expect

threshold

Pressure brings out what is good. It isn't a threat or something to be feared. It's not breaking you down, the way it feels; it's breaking down the walls you've built to keep yourself safe - all the rules you've applied to yourself - which imprison and limit you. 

fine words

One of my favorite examples of the error that can result from words being taken out of context is the following quote from John Milton: 

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

It is a great quote and John Milton definitely wrote it. I've seen it used in books about psychology and inspirational posters and posts. I also think there is some truth to it. 

BUT......what is its context? It's from Milton's Paradise Lost. Which character speaks these words? Satan - the father of lies! So, did John Milton believe that these words were true? No. Not at all. 

The astonishing literary genius of D H Lawrence

D H Lawrence's novel Kangaroo (1923) is such an eloquent expression of 'Australianness'. It's rightly regarded as an Australian classic, even though D H Lawrence wasn't Australian. It's all the more amazing that he wrote the novel in 6 and a half weeks while staying in Thirroul. All together he stayed in Australia for 4 months.

no squared

I wouldn't know how to work hard at reading more

you would, no

more reading hard at work

I would know

some milestones

I think a lot about how difficult it still is as I taper off Valium - how I still, after all this time, am not sleeping well and struggling with mental health issues. 

But then an encouraging thought occurred to me. Every single year for the last 4 years, I have reached a meaningful milestone. At the peak of my Valium use, I was getting through around 50 x 2 mg a week. 

I started seriously tapering in 2021, and by the end of that year I was down to 25 x 2 mg a week. Then, by the end of 2022, I was down to 14 x 2 mg, by the end of 2023, I was down to 10 x 2 mg, and by the end of 2024, I was down to 6 x 2 mg. 

Like I said - each milestone was very meaningful. 25 was meaningful because I didn't feel ready to reduce to that yet, but my doctor forced the issue. I thought - that's OK. I will just drink more. That lead to a really severe alcoholism which took hold really fast. Like, overnight, I started to drink at least 2 bottles of red wine a day, and I needed it. I couldn't stop. It was killing me and I knew that. So, on 15 March 2022, I went into detox and, with help, stopped drinking, and to this day I don't drink at all, and I never will, for the rest of my life. 

I was meant to come off Valium in detox. They did a very fast 8 day taper to get me down to 0. But that wasn't possible for me. It was tough though because my doctor refused to prescribe valium at all for me anymore. It was really dire. Fortunately, I found a doctor who would work with me and allow me to taper more gradually, so I kept pushing myself and by the end of 2022, I was down to 14 x 2 mg. 

Then, throughout 2023, I kept pushing and by the end of that year, I reached 10 x 2 mg, which seemed like a good milestone. It's a nice round number and the next cut would be down to single digits. 

Then, by the end of 2024, I was down to 6 x 2 mg, which is a good milestone because it's less than a whole 2 mg tablet a day. 

At each stage, the next milestone seemed impossible. When I was on 14 x 2 mg a week, I was so hard pressed that getting down to 10 x 2 mg a week seemed almost impossible, but I got there and then I got down to 6 x 2 mg a week, which encourages me that I will be able to make further cuts, as unthinkable as it seems at times. And there aren't that many more cuts that will need to be made.