❧ The Paper Trail
Featured in embedded form on Joeldueck.com and Word put Well
1.22.2012
“Sunder me from my bones, O sword of God
Till they stand stark and strange as do the trees;
That I whose heart goes up with the soaring woods
May marvel as much at these.Sunder me from my blood that in the dark
I hear that red ancestral river run,
Like branching buried floods that find the sea
But never see the sun.Give me miraculous eyes to see my eyes,
Those rolling mirrors made alive in me,
Terrible crystals more incredible
Than all the things they see.Sunder me from my soul, that I may see
”
The sins like streaming wounds, the life’s brave beat;
Till I shall save myself, as I would save
A stranger in the street.
— G.K. Chesterton
(Source: chesterton.wordpress.com)
1.20.2012
“Emerson has said, ‘When half-gods go, the gods arrive.’ This is a very doubtful maxim. Better say, ‘When God arrives, then and only then, the half-gods can remain.’”
— C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves — where he precedes it with, “When God rules in a human heart, though he may sometimes have to remove certain of its native authorities altogether, he often continues others in their offices and, by subjecting their authority to his, gives it for the first time a firm basis.”
1.19.2012
The first two seasons of BBC’s new series Sherlock, in which the classic stories are adapted to an extremely current-day London, have been fantastic.
1.9.2012
1.5.2012
“Christ’s isolation is not that of a prodigy but of a pioneer. He is the first of His kind; He will not be the last.”
1.3.2012
The Dangerous Effect of Reading →
On Sunday I wrote that, “I want to look back on 2012 and say, ‘I produced X’, not ‘I envisioned X.’” Along comes this post describing exactly what I’m talking about. Let 2012 be the year where we set aside our wide-mouthed reading funnels and focus on producing. Let’s face it, we read enough stuff last year to inspire us for the next decade.
12.31.2011
No way Old Man Winter was going to let us start the year without any snow
12.31.2011
Breakfast. I mean, lunch (Taken with instagram)
12.28.2011
Jess had an idea for how to modify one of my old Ikea desks into a nightstand of sorts for our guest room, so that’s what I did last weekend!
12.20.2011
How to Learn About Everything →
First item on the list:
- Read and skim journals and textbooks that (at the moment) you only half understand.
I’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember, due mostly to something I can’t help, a voracious reading appetite. But it works. Read things you don’t completely understand. Don’t demand full context. Every discrete part that you do understand is a puzzle piece that will become useful later. With this approach I’ve developed (or rather, am still developing) a working basic knowledge of a lot of areas, including macroeconomics and typography.
It works with people too. Some of the most rewarding relationships I’ve had have been with people I didn’t understand well at first. In a couple of cases, this was literally true right down to their speech — I could hardly understand them. The best thing is to listen, pretending you get it and sweeping up the bits you can as you go, leading them on with token responses until it begins to click. It sounds deceptive, but I found that eventually, the more I listened the better I understood.
