commonplace book

Kurt Vonnegut on using our talents

art, commonplace book, education, language & literature, on writing / By /

From David Hayman, David Michaelis, George Plimpton, & Richard Rhodes’s interview of Kurt Vonnegut in “The Art of Fiction No. 64” (The Paris Review: Spring 1977, No. 69):

I bawled [my daughter] out one time for not doing more with the talents she had. She replied that having talent doesn’t carry with it the obligation that something has to be done with it. This was startling news to me. I thought people were supposed to grab their talents and run as far and fast as they could.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall”

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Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall” (1880)

To a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Jeff Bezos on the differences between gifts and choices

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From Jeff Bezos’s “We are What We Choose: Remarks by Jeff Bezos, as delivered to the Class of 2010 Baccalaureate” (Princeton University: 30 May 2010):

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

…

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life — the life you author from scratch on your own — begins.

How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?

Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?

Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?

Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?

Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize?

Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?

Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?

When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?

Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.

There, on the Darkened Deathbed by John Masefield

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This is pretty much what I think happens when we die, and unfortunately, what happens eventually after we die.

There, on the darkened deathbed, dies the brain
That flared three several times in seventy years;
It cannot lift the silly hand again,
Nor speak, nor sing, it neither sees nor hears.
And muffled mourners put it in the ground
And then go home, and in the earth it lies,
Too dark for vision and too deep for sound,
The million cells that made a good man wise.
Yet for a few short years an influence stirs,
A sense or wraith or essence of him dead,
Which makes insensate things its ministers
To those beloved, his spirit’s daily bread;
Then that, too, fades; in book or deed a spark
Lingers, then that, too, fades; then all is dark.

Looking at others’ lives for clues to what might have been

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From Tim Kreider’s “The Referendum” (The New York Times: 17 September 2009):

The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt. The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home. It’s exacerbated by the far greater diversity of options available to us now than a few decades ago, when everyone had to follow the same drill. We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning.

It’s especially conspicuous among friends from youth. Young adulthood is an anomalous time in people’s lives; they’re as unlike themselves as they’re ever going to be, experimenting with substances and sex, ideology and religion, trying on different identities before their personalities immutably set. Some people flirt briefly with being freethinking bohemians before becoming their parents. Friends who seemed pretty much indistinguishable from you in your 20s make different choices about family or career, and after a decade or two these initial differences yield such radically divergent trajectories that when you get together again you can only regard each other’s lives with bemused incomprehension.

…

Yes: the Referendum gets unattractively self-righteous and judgmental. Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity, and the naked 3 A.M. terror of regret.

The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is, in effect, a non-repeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, “Light Years,” James Salter writes: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.” Watching our peers’ lives is the closest we can come to a glimpse of the parallel universes in which we didn’t ruin that relationship years ago, or got that job we applied for, or got on that plane after all. It’s tempting to read other people’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own.

A colleague of mine once hosted a visiting cartoonist from Scandinavia who was on a promotional tour. My colleague, who has a university job, a wife and children, was clearly a little wistful about the tour, imagining Brussels, Paris, and London, meeting new fans and colleagues and being taken out for beers every night. The cartoonist, meanwhile, looked forlornly around at his host’s pleasant row house and sighed, almost to himself: “I would like to have such a house.”

One of the hardest things to look at in this life is the lives we didn’t lead, the path not taken, potential left unfulfilled. In stories, those who look back — Lot’s wife, Orpheus and Eurydice — are lost. Looking to the side instead, to gauge how our companions are faring, is a way of glancing at a safer reflection of what we cannot directly bear, like Perseus seeing the Gorgon safely mirrored in his shield.

David Foster Wallace on being a tourist

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From David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” (Gourmet: ):

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

Famous “Laws” of Business & Technology

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These come from a variety of sources; just Google the law to find out more about it.

Parkinson’s Law

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

Source: Cyril Northcote Parkinson in The Economist (1955)

The Peter Principle

“In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”

Source: Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in The Peter Principle (1968)

The Dilbert Principle

“Leadership is nature’s way of removing morons from the productive flow.”

Source: Scott Adams’ Dilbert (February 5, 1995)

Hofstadter’s Law

“It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”

Source: Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979)

Amara’s Law

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

Source: Roy Amara.

Brooks’ Law

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

Source: Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month (1975)

Clarke’s 3 Laws

  1. First law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
  2. Second law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
  3. Third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Source: Arthur C. Clarke’s “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination” in Profiles of the Future (1962)

Conway’s Law

“Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.”

Source: Melvin Conway (1968)

Gall’s Law

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work.”

Source: John Gall’s Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail (1978)

Godwin’s Law

“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”

Source: Mike Godwin (1990)

Hanlon’s Razor

“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

Herblock’s Law

“If it’s good, they’ll stop making it.”

Source: Herbert Lawrence Block

Kranzberg’s 6 Laws of Technology

  1. Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.
  2. Invention is the mother of necessity.
  3. Technology comes in packages, big and small.
  4. Although technology might be a prime element in many public issues, nontechnical factors take precedence in technology-policy decisions.
  5. All history is relevant, but the history of technology is the most relevant.
  6. Technology is a very human activity – and so is the history of technology.

Source: Melvin Kranzberg’s “Kranzberg’s Laws” Technology and Culture, Vol. 27, No. 3 (1986): 544-560

Linus’s Law

“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

Source: Linus Torvalds

Schneier’s Law

“Any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can’t think of how to break it.”

Source: Cory Doctorow’s “Microsoft Research DRM talk” (17 June 2004)

Sturgeon’s Revelation

“90 percent of everything is crap.”

Source: Theodore Sturgeon (1951)

Wirth’s Law

“Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.”

Source: Niklaus Wirth (1995)

Zawinski’s Law

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”

Source: Jamie Zawinski

Granneman’s Law of Operating System Usage

“To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just need to work on it. ”

Source: Scott Granneman’s “Linux vs. Windows Viruses” in SecurityFocus (10 February 2003)

What dogs give us

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Creative Commons License photo credit: Cia de Foto

From Gene Weingarten’s “Murphy’s Law” (The Washington Post: 3 May 2009):

[My dog] Murphy has a good life, which is the least we humans can do for a dog, in return for what they give us, which is access to the sort of innocence and trust and absence of guile or pretension that’s lacking in our own species. That’s the gentle transaction between dog and human.

Van Gogh on death

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From Roger Ebert’s “Go gentle into that good night” (Roger Ebert’s Journal: 2 May 2009):

Van Gogh in Arles wrote this about death:

Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why? I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means. To die quietly of old age, would be to go there on foot.

Roger Ebert on death

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From Roger Ebert’s “Go gentle into that good night” (Roger Ebert’s Journal: 2 May 2009):

What I expect will most probably happen [when I die] is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function, and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. Perhaps I have been infertile. If I discover that somewhere along the way I conceived a child, let that child step forward and he or she will behold a happy man. Through my wife, I have had stepchildren and grandchildren, and I love them unconditionally, which is the only kind of love worth bothering with.

I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés, that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and happily torturing people with my jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all eventually die as well, but so it goes.

I drank for many years in a tavern that had a photograph of Brendan Behan on the wall, and under it this quotation, which I memorized:

I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don’t respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.

For 57 words, that does a pretty good job of summing it up. “Kindness” covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. Kindness is why I vote liberal and not conservative–but let’s not go there, not today. I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

From Philip Larkin’s “Aubade”

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From Philip Larkin’s “Aubade“:

I work all day, and get half drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
– The good not used, the love not given, time
Torn off unused – nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never:
But at the total emptiness forever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says no rational being
Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing
that this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no-one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

To solve a problem, you first have to figure out the problem

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From Russell L. Ackoff & Daniel Greenberg’s Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track (2008):

A classic story illustrates very well the potential cost of placing a problem in a disciplinary box. It involves a multistoried office building in New York. Occupants began complaining about the poor elevator service provided in the building. Waiting times for elevators at peak hours, they said, were excessively long. Several of the tenants threatened to break their leases and move out of the building because of this…

Management authorized a study to determine what would be the best solution. The study revealed that because of the age of the building no engineering solution could be justified economically. The engineers said that management would just have to live with the problem permanently.

The desperate manager called a meeting of his staff, which included a young recently hired graduate in personnel psychology…The young man had not focused on elevator performance but on the fact that people complained about waiting only a few minutes. Why, he asked himself, were they complaining about waiting for only a very short time? He concluded that the complaints were a consequence of boredom. Therefore, he took the problem to be one of giving those waiting something to occupy their time pleasantly. He suggested installing mirrors in the elevator boarding areas so that those waiting could look at each other or themselves without appearing to do so. The manager took up his suggestion. The installation of mirrors was made quickly and at a relatively low cost. The complaints about waiting stopped.

Today, mirrors in elevator lobbies and even on elevators in tall buildings are commonplace.

People being rescued run from their rescuers

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From Les Jones’s email in Bruce Schneier’s “Crypto-Gram” (15 August 2005):

Avoiding rescuers is a common reaction in people who have been lost in the woods. See Dwight McCarter’s book, “Lost,” an account of search and rescue operations in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In one chapter McCarter tells the story of two backpackers in the park who got separated while traveling off-trail in the vicinity of Thunderhead. The less-experienced hiker quickly got lost.

After a day or two wandering around he was going through his pack and found a backpacking how-to book that explained what to do in case you got lost in the woods. Following the advice, he went to a clearing and built a signal fire. A rescue helicopter saw the smoke and hovered overhead above the tree tops as he waved his arms to attract their attention. The helicopter dropped a sleeping bag and food, with a note saying they couldn’t land in the clearing, but that they would send in a rescue party on foot.

The lost hiker sat down, tended his fire, and waited for rescue. When the rescuers appeared at the edge of the clearing, he panicked, jumped up, and ran in the other direction. They had to chase him down to rescue him. This despite the fact that he wanted to be rescued, had taken active steps to attract rescuers, and knew that rescuers were coming to him. Odd but true.

Graveyard shifts and torpedo coffins

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From Atul Gawande’s “Final Cut: Medical arrogance and the decline of the autopsy” (The New Yorker: 19 March 2001):

… in the nineteenth century … [some doctors] waited until burial and then robbed the graves, either personally or through accomplices, an activity that continued into the twentieth century. To deter such autopsies, some families would post nighttime guards at the grave site – hence the term “graveyard shift.” Others placed heavey stones on the coffins. In 1878, one company in Columbus, Ohio, even sold “torpedo cofins,” equipped with pipe bombs designed to blow up if they were tampered with.

Earliest recorded autopsy

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From Atul Gawande’s “Final Cut: Medical arrogance and the decline of the autopsy” (The New Yorker: 19 March 2001):

The Roman physician Antistius performed one of the earliest forensic examinations on record, in 44 B.C., on Julius Caesar, documenting twenty-three stab wounds, including a final, fatal stab to the chest.

The Ellsberg Paradox: People prefer definites over ambiguity

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From Nicholas Lemann’s “Paper Tiger” (The New Yorker: 4 November 2002):

Ellsberg devoted a good portion of his life to decision theory, and made quite a significant contribution for somebody so young. People are still publishing comments on his best-known idea, the so-called “Ellsberg paradox.”

The paradox arises from a series of games involving colored balls in urns. Let’s say there are two urns, each of which contains a hundred balls, which are either red or black. One urn contains fifty red balls and fifty black balls. The proportion of red and black in the other urn is unknown. You can draw one ball from one of the urns, without looking, and if you draw a red ball you win a hundred dollars. Which urn will you choose?

There is no good reason to think that the chance of getting a red ball is any better in one urn than in the other, but Ellsberg found that people overwhelmingly chose the urn known to have fifty balls of each color. The person running the game would then say, “O.K., you think that urn is likelier to have a red ball; now I’m going to offer you a hundred dollars if you draw a black ball.” If you turned to the fifty-fifty urn for the red ball, it would seem you had a hunch that the other urn contained more black balls, and therefore you should try to draw your black ball from it. But, overwhelmingly, people chose the fifty-fifty urn again. The Ellsberg paradox is that people so strongly prefer definite information over ambiguity that they make choices consistent neither with the laws of probability nor with themselves.