Analyzing Writing Quotes

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.

One writes not to be read but to breathe...one writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one's mind, to dissipate one's fears, to face one's doubts, to look at one's mistakes--in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one's joy, but also to disperse one's gloom. Like prayer--you go to it in sorrow more than joy, for help, a road back to 'grace'.

I don't want to analyze myself or anything, but I think, in fact I know this to be true, that I enter the world through what I write. I grew up believing, and continue to believe, that I am a screw-up, that growing up with my family and friends, I had nothing to offer in any conversation. But when I started writing, suddenly there was something that I brought to the party that was at a high-enough level.

See, if you analyze stuff long enough, you’ll eventually break ideas down to the quantum level where nothing makes sense and there’s no longer any meaning to anything. And then when you try to put it all back together again, you realize the pieces just don’t fit anymore. Worse, you realize that the pieces never fit in the first place. And then you’re left with a heap of broken ideas and beliefs that are shattered beyond repair. That’s reality, and that’s what I write about.

One writes not to be read but to breathe...one writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one's mind, to dissipate one's fears, to face one's doubts, to look at one's mistakes--in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one's joy, but also to disperse one's gloom. Like prayer--you go to it in sorrow more than joy, for help, a road back to 'grace'." — Anne Morrow Lindbergh (War Within and Without: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1939-1944)

What if I have not been writing? Feelings wouldn’t have died; expression wouldn’t have sharpened. I wouldn’t have analyzed many of my deeds and others’ deeds to me. Small and irrelevant looking incidents of life wouldn’t have appeared priceless.

NOTICE Persons attempting to find a "text" in this book will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a "subtext" in this book will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise "understand" it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR

And besides, I'm not a writer. I don't go to coffeehouses and smoke, wear black, and analyze Sylvia Plath to the point of depression.

In the world of my imagination, Esther was still my companion, and her love gave me the strength to go forward and explore all my frontiers. In the real world, she was pure obsession, sapping my energy, taking up all the available space, and obliging me to make an enormous effort just to continue with my life. How was it possible that, even after two years, I had still not managed to forget her? I could not bear having to think about it anymore, analyzing all the possibilities, and trying various ways out: deciding simply to accept the situation, writing a book, practicing yoga, doing some charity work, seeing friends, seducing women, going out to supper, to the cinema (always avoiding adaptations of books, of course, and seeking out films that had been specially written for the screen), to the theater, the ballet, to soccer games. The Zahir always won, though; it was always there, making me think, "I wish she was here with me.

I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do. I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul, - and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because "there is no flesh in his obdurate heart." I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.

Separate the processes of creating from improving. You can’t write and edit or sculpt and polish or make and analyze at the same time. If you do, the editor stops the creator. While you invent, don’t select. While you sketch, don’t inspect. While you write the first draft, don’t reflect. At the start, the creator mind must be unleashed from judgment.

I love to write, and I love to read too, but that doesn't mean I like to write about reading - 'cause nothing ruins the fun of reading a good story like the evil English army of Discuss, Analyze, and that hideous duo Compare and Contrast.

I once heard an author describe writing as taking bits and pieces of her experiences and observations, then she questions, dissects, and analyzes them. She extrapolates from them, stretching the thought out. Then she adds from her imagination a big dose of what might have been, a good measure of what would never be, and spices it all with wishful thinking.

Long before we had writing or farms or post-digital strike helicopters, we had each other. We lived together and changed each other, and so we needed to say “this is who I am, this is what I do.” So, in the same way that we attached sounds to meanings to make language, we began to attach clusters of behavior to signal social roles. Those clusters were rich, and quick-changing, and so just like language, we needed networks devoted to processing them. We needed a place in the brain to construct and to analyze gender.

Dreams and visions are not always intended to be interpreted or analyzed. At times they say exactly what they mean, providing a set of images and meanings to be taken for no more or less than they are.

Becoming an effective letter writer means analyzing each situation individually and choosing the form of correspondence accordingly.

The focus of gap analysis should be getting to the other side. If you bend-over to analyze a gap too long, you'll probably fall into it.

What’s it like being a writer? Mostly it’s like being a child surrounded by adults. My friends have grown-up careers. They balance spreadsheets, analyze data, negotiate deals. They build things, heal patients, teach children. Meanwhile, I’m over here saying “Let’s pretend.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

Your story is not a picture of life; it lacks the elements of truth. And why? Simply because you run straight on to the end; because you do not analyze. Your heroes do this thing or that from this or that motive, which you assign without ever a thought of dissecting their mental and moral natures. Our feelings, you must remember, are far more complex than all that. In real life every act is the resultant of a hundred thoughts that come and go, and these you must study, each by itself, if you would create a living character. 'But,' you will say, 'in order to note these fleeting thoughts one must know them, must be able to follow them in their capricious meanderings.You have simply to make use of hypnotism, electrical or human, which gives one a two-fold being, setting free the witness-personality so that it may see, understand, and remember the reasons which determine the personality that acts.

Writing doesn’t get any easier with time or talent. If writing is easy for you, you’re probably still learning the craft. You haven’t perfected your style or landed upon your “voice.” You haven’t learned to analyze your writing with a critical eye, to rip it apart and figure out why it isn’t doing exactly what you want.

Edward M. Hallowell, a psychiatrist who specializes in brain science, explains, play has a positive effect on the executive function of the brain. “The brain’s executive functions,” he writes, “include planning, prioritizing, scheduling, anticipating, delegating, deciding, analyzing—in short, most of the skills any executive must master in order to excel in business.

For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear under different names in every system of thought, whether they be called cause, operation and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit and the Son; but which we will call here the Knower, the Doer and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty. These three are equal. Each is that which he is, essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others latent in him and his own, patent.

I first met Winston Churchill in the early summer of 1906 at a dinner party to which I went as a very young girl. Our hostess was Lady Wemyss and I remember that Arthur Balfour, George Wyndman, Hilaire Belloc and Charles Whibley were among the guests… I found myself sitting next to this young man who seemed to me quite different from any other young man I had ever met. For a long time he seemed sunk in abstraction. Then he appeared to become suddenly aware of my existence. He turned on me a lowering gaze and asked me abruptly how old I was. I replied that I was nineteen. “And I,” he said despairingly, “am thirty-two already. Younger than anyone else who counts, though, “he added, as if to comfort himself. Then savagely: “Curse ruthless time! Curse our mortality. How cruelly short is this allotted span for all we must cram into it!” And he burst forth into an eloquent diatribe on the shortness of human life, the immensity of possible human accomplishment—a theme so well exploited by the poets, prophets, and philosophers of all ages that it might seem difficult to invest it with new and startling significance. Yet for me he did so, in a torrent of magnificent language which appeared to be both effortless and inexhaustible and ended up with the words I shall always remember: “We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow worm.” By this time I was convinced of it—and my conviction remained unshaken throughout the years that followed. Later he asked me whether I thought that words had a magic and music quite independent of their meaning. I said I certainly thought so, and I quoted as a classic though familiar instance the first lines that came into my head. Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. His eyes blazed with excitement. “Say that again,” he said, “say it again—it is marvelous!” “But I objected, “You know these lines. You know the ‘Ode to a Nightengale.’ ” He had apparently never read or heard of it before (I must, however, add that next time I met him he had not learned not merely this but all of the odes to Keats by heart—and he recited them quite mercilessly from start to finish, not sparing me a syllable). Finding that he liked poetry, I quoted to him from one of my own favorite poets, Blake. He listened avidly, repeating some lines to himself with varying emphases and stresses, then added meditatively: “I never knew that old Admiral had found so much time to write such good poetry.” I was astounded that he, with his acute susceptibility to words and power of using them, should have left such tracts of English literature entirely unexplored. But however it happened he had lost nothing by it, when he approached books it was “with a hungry, empty mind and with fairly srong jaws, and what I got I *bit*.” And his ear for the beauty of language needed no tuning fork. Until the end of dinner I listened to him spellbound. I can remember thinking: This is what people mean when they talk of seeing stars. That is what I am doing now. I do not to this day know who was on my other side. Good manners, social obligation, duty—all had gone with the wind. I was transfixed, transported into a new element. I knew only that I had seen a great light. I recognized it as the light of genius… I cannot attempt to analyze, still less transmit, the light of genius. But I will try to set down, as I remember them, some of the differences which struck me between him and all the others, young and old, whom I have known. First and foremost he was incalculable. He ran true to no form. There lurked in his every thought and world the ambush of the unexpected. I felt also that the impact of life, ideas and even words upon his mind, was not only vivid and immediate, but direct. Between him and them there was no shock absorber of vicarious thought or precedent gleaned either from books or other minds. His relationship wit

If you carry a purse laden with the complete contents of a drugstore, you already know about planful problem-solving. If you write lists, keep calendars, or follow a budget, you know what planful problem-solving entails. It does what it says on the label: you analyze the problem, you make a plan based on your analysis, and then you execute the plan.

Review not a writer; read, analyze and understand its writing, which also mirrors and reflects its thoughts and persona.

Colored like a sunset tide is a gaze sharply slicing through the reflective glass. A furrowed brow is set much too seriously, as if trying to unfold the pieces of the face that stared back at it. One eyebrow is raised skeptically, always calculating and analyzing its surroundings. I tilt my head trying to see the deeper meaning in my features, trying to imagine the connection between my looks and my character as I stare in the mirror for the required five minutes. From the dark brown hair fastened tightly in a bun, a curl as bright as woven gold comes loose. A flash of unruly hair prominent through the typical browns is like my temper; always there, but not always visible. I begin to grow frustrated with the girl in the mirror, and she cocks her hip as if mocking me. In a moment, her lips curve in a half smile, not quite detectable in sight but rather in feeling, like the sensation of something good just around the corner. A chin was set high in a stubborn fashion, symbolizing either persistence or complete adamancy. Shoulders are held stiff like ancient mountains, proud but slightly arrogant. The image watches with the misty eyes of a daydreamer, glazed over with a sort of trance as if in the middle of a reverie, or a vision. Every once and a while, her true fears surface in those eyes, terror that her life would amount to nothing, that her work would have no impact. Words written are meant to be read, and sometimes I worry that my thoughts and ideas will be lost with time. My dream is to be an author, to be immortalized in print and live forever in the minds of avid readers. I want to access the power in being able to shape the minds of the young and open, and alter the minds of the old and resolute. Imagine the power in living forever, and passing on your ideas through generations. With each new reader, a new layer of meaning is uncovered in writing, meaning that even the author may not have seen. In the mirror, I see a girl that wants to change the world, and change the way people think and reason. Reflection and image mean nothing, for the girl in the mirror is more than a one dimensional picture. She is someone who has followed my footsteps with every lesson learned, and every mistake made. She has been there to help me find a foothold in the world, and to catch me when I fall. As the lights blink out, obscuring her face, I realize that although that image is one that will puzzle me in years to come, she and I aren’t so different after all.

SHOHAKU OKUMURA: We human beings have the ability to think of things not in front of us. We create stories in our minds in which the hero or heroine is always us. We evaluate what happened in the past, we analyze our present conditions, and we anticipate what should happen in the future. This is an important ability. Because of it, we can create art, study history, and have visions of the future. Without it, we couldn’t write or enjoy poems or movies. Almost all of human culture depends on seeing things not in front of our eyes. This means almost all culture is fictitious. Our ability to create such fictions is the reality of our lives. We cannot live without it. But this ability leads to many problems. We have certain expectations of our stories. If things go as we expect, we feel like heavenly beings, but if not, we feel we’re in hell. Often we desire more and more without ever experiencing satisfaction, like hungry ghosts. It’s important to see that it’s not life that causes suffering but our expectation that life should be the way we want. We can’t live without expectation, but if we can handle the feelings caused by the difference between our expectations and reality, that’s liberation. Zazen practice as taught by Dogen Zenji, Sawaki Roshi, and Uchiyama Roshi is taking a break from watching the screen of our stories and sitting down on the ground of the reality that exists before our imagination. When we’re not taken in by our fictitious world, we can enjoy and learn from the stories we make.

Intellectuals analyze the operations of international systems; statesmen build them. And there is a vast difference between the perspective of an analyst and that of a statesman. The analyst can choose which problem he wishes to study, whereas the statesman’s problems are imposed on him. The analyst can allot whatever time is necessary to come to a clear conclusion; the overwhelming challenge to the statesman is the pressure of time. The analyst runs no risk. If his conclusions prove wrong, he can write another treatise. The statesman is permitted only one guess; his mistakes are irretrievable. The analyst has available to him all the facts; he will be judged on his intellectual power. The statesman must act on assessments that cannot be proved at the time that he is making them; he will be judged by history on the basis of how wisely he managed the inevitable change and, above all, by how well he preserves the peace.

You can’t apply academic rules to art of any kind. As soon as you begin to have rules, you begin to say, “Well, it works like this: A plus B equals C,” and then you’re absolutely, perfectly lost. You have to take the chance! You’re gambling all the time, sometimes with no idea if a story works. But the alarming thing is in the teaching of literature, laying down what the writer was doing. If you can see through it like that, the writing is no good. You can’t see through Dickens and Conrad. It’s a mystery how it’s done, even to the person doing it. If you think you know, you’re in deep, deep trouble. It’s rather like a born athlete analyzing: if you have a baseball player who can tell you exactly how he does it, then he’s not telling the truth; he doesn’t know. And I think once you lose touch with that, and believe you’re in charge, you could lose touch with the whole business of writing fiction. It’s an endless struggle to fool yourself. Just get going, that’s the important thing.

The language of worldview tends to imply, to paraphrase the Catholic writer Richard Rohr, that we can think ourselves into new ways of behaving. But that is not the way culture works. Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. The risk in thinking 'worldviewishly' is that we will start to think that the best way to change culture is to analyze it. We will start worldview academies, host worldview seminars, write worldview books. These may have some real value if they help us understand the horizons that our culture shapes, but they cannot substitute for the creation of real cultural goods. And they will subtly tend to produce philosophers rather than plumbers, abstract thinkers instead of artists and artisans. They can create a cultural niche in which 'worldview thinkers' are privileged while other kinds of culture makers are shunted aside. But culture is not changed simply by thinking.

PROLOGUE Equinox: Whispers of Destiny Have you ever had the feeling that someone was playing with your destiny? If so, this book is for you. Destiny is certainly a topic people like to talk about. Wherever we go, we hear it mentioned in conversations or proverbs that seek to lay bare its mysteries. If we analyze people’s attitude towards destiny a little, we find straight away that at one extreme there are those who believe that everything in life is planned by a higher power and that therefore things always happen for a reason, even though our limited human understanding cannot comprehend why. In that perspective, everything is preordained, regardless of what we do or don’t do. At the other extreme we find the I can do it! Believers. These focus on themselves: anything is possible if done with conviction, as part of the plan that they have drawn up themselves as the architects of their own destiny. We can safely say that everything happens for a reason. Whether it’s because of decisions we take or simply because circumstances determine it, there is always more causation than coincidence in life. But sometimes such strange things happen. The most insignificant occurrence or decision can give way to the most unexpected futures. Indeed, such twists of fate may well be the reason why you are reading my book now. Do you have any idea of the number of events, circumstances and decisions that had to conspire for me to write this and for you to be reading it now? There are so many coincidences that had to come together that it might almost seem a whim of destiny that today we are connected by these words. One infinitesimal change in that set of circumstances and everything would have been quite different… All these fascinating ideas are to be found in Equinox. I am drawn to fantasy literature because of all the coincidences to reality. As a reader you’re relaxed, your defenses down, trusting the writer to take you on an adventure. This is the ideal space for you to allow yourself to be carried away to an imaginary world that, paradoxically, will leave you reflecting on life questions that have little to do with fiction, but I ask you that perhaps maybe they do.   Gonzalo Guma

I have found from costly experience that it is much easier to analyze the facts after writing them down. In fact, merely writing the facts on a piece of paper and stating our problem clearly goes a long way toward helping us reach a sensible decision. As Charles Kettering puts it: “A problem well stated is a problem half solved.

it is never a waste to write for intrinsic reasons. First of all, writing gives the mind a disciplined means of expression. It allows one to record events and experiences so that they can be easily recalled, and relived in the future. It is a way to analyze and understand experiences, a self-communication that brings order to them.

When Northwestern and Stanford researchers analyzed the networks that give rise to creative triumph, they found what they deemed a “universal” setup. Whether they looked at research groups in economics or ecology, or the teams that write, compose, and produce Broadway musicals, thriving ecosystems had porous boundaries between teams.

as Edward M. Hallowell, a psychiatrist who specializes in brain science, explains, play has a positive effect on the executive function of the brain. “The brain’s executive functions,” he writes, “include planning, prioritizing, scheduling, anticipating, delegating, deciding, analyzing—in short, most of the skills any executive must master in order to excel in business.

When people come together — let's say they come to a little party or something — you always hear them discuss character. They will say this one has a bad character, this one has a good character, this one Is a fool, this one is a miser. Gossip makes the conversation. They all analyze character. It seems that the analysis of character is the highest human entertainment. And literature does it, unlike gossip, without mentioning real names. The writers who don't discuss character but problems —social problems or any problems — take away from literature its very essence. They stop being entertaining. We, for some reason, always love to discuss and discover character. This is because each character is different, and human character is the greatest of puzzles.

Most journals are repositories of great swatches of abstraction and generalization and self-analysis and interpretation and all that bad stuff. Don’t do that. But here’s a certain kind of journal that might be useful to you: at the end of the day or beginning of the next day, return to some event of the day that evoked an emotion in you. Record that event in the journal. But do this only—only—moment to moment through the senses. Absolutely never name an emotion; never start explaining or analyzing or interpreting an emotion. Record only through those five ways I mentioned that we feel emotions—signals inside the body, signals outside the body, flashes of the past, flashes of the future, sensual selectivity—which are therefore the best ways to express emotions.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, conn a ship, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve an equation, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Sigmund Freud founded virtually all of psychotherapy on introspection, so one would expect him to be able to explain his own feelings, no matter how primitive. In one area, however, he baffled himself: He could not explain group loyalty. He wrote that he was “irresistibly” bonded to Jews and Jewishness, by “many obscure and emotional forces, which were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as by a clear consciousness of inner identity, a deep realization of sharing the same psychic structure.” Freud was writing about powerful feelings of kinship to an entire people. These are the feelings of nationalists and fanatics—and of ordinary people—and do not lend themselves to precise analysis. By refusing to take seriously that which they cannot analyze, social scientists misunderstand how real societies work.

Though it isn't customary to say goodbye to the reader at the end of a book, I feel that I can't end this account without also saying goodbye to you. It has turned out to be a book of goodbyes. I can only suppose I needed to say those goodbyes at length, to analyze the reasons or them and to understand them a little better. As you have been my companion on this journey, indeed my audience, the very reason for this exercise, I find myself suddenly bereft at the thought of parting ways with you too. As you have the advantage over me, in knowing more about my life than I will ever know about yours, I can only write in generalities when I wish you good fortune in all things in the future. As well as from the bottom of my heart, to bid you auf Wiedersehen and adieu. If there are tears in my eyes as I write this, they are for you. Arrivederci.

As Furedi explains it, in the modern American family, parents dissect almost every parenting act, even the most routine, analyzing it in minute detail, correlating it with a negative or a positive outcome, and endowing it with far-reaching implications for child development. “It is not surprising,” he writes, “that parents who are told that they possess this enormous power to do good and to do harm feel anxious and overwhelmed.

I survived. Raped children are supposed to die. What would the culture of the individual white cisgender male straight genius do without us? We are the predicate of their sentences, material for their dispassionate dissections. We are supposed to die prettily and vacantly so our rage doesn’t tear down all their certificates and awards and case files, trash their analysis and ram their face in the privilege that allows them to side with our abusers in silencing and killing us. “He has sometimes likened his style of writing to that of a medic performing a post-mortem on a raped child-whose job is to analyze the injuries, not to give vent to the rage that is felt.” - Susie Mackenzie on J.G. Ballard, Guardian, Sept. 6th, 2003 If Ballard’s is the model for the experimental, political novel, how is the (un)dead raped child supposed to write, even if she survives?

As a prospective writer, I would urge you to not only read good books. Read terrible books as well, because they can be more inspiring than the good books. If you are inspired by a good book, there’s always the danger of plagiarism, of doing something that is too much like that good book. Whereas, a genuinely helpful reaction to a piece of work that you’re reading is, ‘Jesus Christ, I could write this shit!’ That is immensely liberating — to find somebody who is published who is doing much, much worse than you. And by analyzing why they are doing so badly, this will immensely help your own style. You’ll find out all of the mistakes not to make. ‘Why did this story offend me so much?’ Analyze that. Find out why you didn’t like it. Find out all of the examples of clumsiness or bad thinking that spoiled the story for you. That will probably be a lot more helpful to your career as a writer.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” ― Robert A. Heinlein, writing as Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love

The act of writing is a contemplative vision quest, a somber expedition of discovery that requires the writer to subordinate their ego in order to travel in soulful solitude towards a desirable personal haven of rejuvenating enlightenment. Writing for personal growth entails unconditionally surrendering oneself to the struggle of tearing their sense of self apart. It demands the solemn willpower to dissect and analyze the fissures of a self-absorbent soul one layer at a time.

[He] taught me many things: how to create a sentence, how to think about language and all its devices as an orchestra and search of a musical score, how to analyze a text and understand how it is constructed and why... He taught me to read and write again, but this time I knew what I was doing, why, and what for. And above all how. He never tired of telling me that in literature there is only one real theme: not what is narrated, but how it is narrated. The rest, he said, was decoration.

Matthias and I met up again in the lab after Christmas vacations and sat down to write our paper. One major question was where to send it. Nature, the British journal, and its American counterpart Science, enjoy the most prestige and visibility in the scientific community and in the general media, and either would have been an obvious choice. But they both impose strict length limits on manuscripts, and I wanted to explain all the details of what we had done—not only to convince the world that we had the real thing but also to promote our painstaking methods of extracting and analyzing ancient DNA. In addition, I had become disenchanted with both journals because of their tendency to publish flashy ancient DNA results that did not meet the scientific criteria our group considered necessary. They often seemed more interested in publishing papers that would give them coverage in the New York Times and other major media outlets than in making sure the results were sound and likely to hold up.

The principal aim underlying this work is to render homage where homage is due, a task which I know beforehand is impossible of accomplishment. Were I to do it properly, I would have to get down on my knees and thank each blade of grass for rearing its head. What chiefly motivates me in this vain task is the fact that in general we know all too little about the influences which shape a writer’s life and work. The critic, in his pompous conceit and arrogance, distorts the true picture beyond all recognition. The author, however truthful he may think himself to be, inevitably disguises the picture. The psychologist, with his single-track view of things, only deepens the blur. As author, I do not think myself an exception to the rule. I, too, am guilty of altering, distorting and disguising the facts — if ‘facts’ there be. My conscious effort, however, has been — perhaps to a fault– in the opposite direction. I am on the side of revelation, if not always on the side of beauty, truth, wisdom, harmony and ever-evolving perfection. In this work I am throwing out fresh data, to be judged and analyzed, or accepted and enjoyed for enjoyment’s sake. Naturally I cannot write about all the books, or even all the significant ones, which I have read in the course of my life. But I do intend to go on writing about books and authors until I have exhausted the importance (for me) of this domain of reality. To have undertaken the thankless task of listing all the books I can recall ever reading gives me extreme pleasure and satisfaction. I know of no author who has been mad enough to attempt this. Perhaps my list will give rise to more confusion — but its purpose is not that. Those who know how to read a man know how to read his books.

Resource constrained instead of not enough people to do the job. Bake in the numbers instead of include. In the August timeframe instead of August. Tasked by the organization instead of assigned. The optics of the plan instead of how the plan will look. Double-click the point instead of emphasize. Drill down instead of analyze. Scope this out instead of check further. On a go-forward basis instead of in the future. Operationalized its goal, instead of achieved. Aggressively ramp headcount instead of hiring a lot of people. Or bandwidth — as in I don’t have the bandwidth (time) for that meeting or He doesn’t

There are innumerable cases like that. The Machine is only a tool after all, which can help humanity progress faster by taking some of the burdens of calculations and interpretations off its back. The task of the human brain remains what it has always been; that of discovering new data to be analyzed, and of devising new concepts to be tested. A pity the Society for Humanity won’t understand that.” “They are against the Machine?” “They would be against mathematics or against the art of writing if they had lived at the appropriate time. These reactionaries of the Society claim the Machine robs man of his soul.

I'm struck by the difficulty I had in formulating it. When I think back now, I ask myself what else it was that I was talking about in Madness and Civilization or The Birth of the Clinic, but power? Yet I'm perfectly aware that I scarcely ever used the word and never had such a field of analyses at my disposal. I can say that this was an incapacity linked undoubtedly with the political situation in which we found ourselves. It is hard to see where, either on the Right or the Left, this problem of power could then have been posed. On the Right, it was posed only in terms of constitution, sovereignty, and so on, that is, in juridical terms; on the Marxist side, it was posed only in terms of the state apparatus. The way power was exercised - concretely, and in detail - with its specificity, its techniques and tactics, was something no one attempted to ascertain; they contented themselves with denouncing it in a polemical and global fashion as it existed among the "other," in the adversary camp. Where Soviet socialist power was in question, its opponents called it totalitarianism; power in Western capitalism was denounced by the Marxists as class domination; but the mechanics of power in themselves were never analyzed.

Recounting the narrative of our personal story in a methodical and chronological manner helps us see our life in a historical perspective. Telling our personal stories allows us to bring hibernated memories out of seclusion. Reexamination of our historical existence under the light of growing conscious awareness assist us make psychological breakthroughs. Analyzing the elemental substance of our personal story from a sundry of viewpoints employing techniques of literature, philosophy, logical reasoning, and abstract thinking assist us perceive our discrete chronicle in symbolic terms and in mythological context.

Those kids are less likely to come, perhaps because they’re less inclined to analyze and dig deep—that’s not their comfort zone. The so-called shy kids are often hungry to brainstorm ideas, deconstruct them, and act on them, and, paradoxically, when they’re allowed to interact this way, they’re not shy at all. They’re connecting with each other, but in a deeper zone, in a place that’s considered boring or tiresome by some of their peers.” And these kids do “come out” when they’re ready; most of the Writopia kids read their works at local bookstores, and a staggering number win prestigious national writing competitions.

Preschoolers make a number of assumptions about words and their meaning as they acquire language, one of the most important of which is what the psychologist Ellen Markman calls the principle of mutual exclusivity. Simply put, this means that small children have difficulty believing that any one object can have two different names. The natural assumption of children, Markman argues, is that if an object or person is given a second label, then that label must refer to some secondary property or attribute of that object. You can see how useful this assumption is to a child faced with the extraordinary task of assigning a word to everything in the world. A child who learns the word elephant knows, with absolute certainty, that it is something different from a dog. Each new word makes the child's knowledge of the world more precise. Without mutual exclusivity, by contrast, if a child thought that elephant could simply be another label for dog, then each new word would make the world seem more complicated. Mutual exclusivity also helps the child think clearly. "Suppose," Markman writes, "a child who already knows 'apple' and 'red' hears someone refer to an apple as 'round.' By mutual exclusivity, the child can eliminate the object (apple) and its color (red) as the meaning of 'round' and can try to analyze the object for some other property to label.

What is the writer to do? I think the answer is, given the writer’s linguistic competence: Have faith. First, recognize that the art of writing is immensely more difficult than the beginning writer may at first believe but in the end can be mastered by anyone willing to do the work. Good writing involves the operation of many mental processes at once, and in the beginning one must deal with those many processes one at a time, breaking down the total job into its smallest segments: getting down roughly what one is trying to say; closely analyzing the words with which one has said it to see what they are saying (or refusing to say); then thinking about (a) how one can make the words stop saying what one does not want them to say and (b) how whatever it is that the words are saying might be turned to account.

If one reads attentively, Wittgenstein writes as much in one of the rare pas- sages in which he makes use (in English) of the term “to constitute” with respect to the rules of chess: What idea do we have of the king of chess, and what is its relation to the rules of chess? . . . Do these rules follow from the idea? No, the rules are not something contained in the idea and got by analyzing it. They constitute it. . . . The rules constitute the “freedom” of the pieces. (Wittgenstein 5, p. 86) Rules are not separable into something like an idea or a concept of the king (the king is the piece that is moved according to this or that rule): they are immanent to the movements of the king; they express the autoconstitution process of their game. In the autoconstitution of a form of life what is in question is its freedom.

One feature of sexual politics is the almost complete absence of critical scholarship that approaches it from any viewpoint other than enthusiastic advocacy. Ostensibly objective scholars are often active participants and promoters of the phenomenon they should be studying and understanding critically. Scholars who refrain from endorsing sexual liberation and insist on analyzing these subjects from a detached perspective find it almost impossible to publish their work and are quickly driven from the universities. “Some subjects are not only undebatable; they are unresearchable,” writes Phyllis Schlafly, “because they don’t want the public to know the facts that research might uncover.” 4 The fact is that the Western academic world today is not an “open society” of free inquiry and critical thinking. It is largely closed, inbred, and controlled by heresy-hunters who vet scholarship according to a litmus test of political doctrine and punish heterodoxy with ostracism.

People today associate rivalry with boundless aggression and find it difficult to conceive of competition that does not lead directly to thoughts of murder. Kohut writes of one of his patients: "Even as a child he had become afraid of emotionally cathected competitiveness for fear of the underlying (near delusional) fantasies of exerting absolute, sadistic power." Herbert Hendin says of the students he analyzed and interviewed at Columbia that "they could conceive of no competition that did not result in someone's annihilation." The prevalence of such fears helps to explain why Americans have become uneasy about rivalry unless it is accompanied by the disclaimer that winning and losing don't matter or that games are unimportant anyway. The identification of competition with the wish to annihilate opponents inspires Dorcas Butt's accusation that competitive sports have made us a nation of militarists, fascists, and predatory egoists; have encouraged "poor sportsmanship " in all social relations; and have extinguished cooperation and compassion.

Behavior Rehearsal Behavior rehearsal is practicing your actions until you feel confident about them. The first step is to visualize the ideal situation. Imagine the scenario and see yourself feeling relaxed and comfortable. Imagine others reacting positively and think about what you will say and do. It may also help to write out the scenario in your journal. Sometimes writing down what you want to say “cements” it in your mind. Next, practice what you imagined. It may help to do this with a friend or family member acting as the other characters. For instance, if you are afraid to call about a job opening, rehearse what you want to say with your mom or dad playing the role of the employer. Or, if you are going to an event where you do not know many people, practice with a sibling introducing yourself to a stranger. Pay special attention to the various maladaptive thoughts and expectations you may have regarding the situation. Analyze them and explore how realistic they are. Once you feel you have a handle on the situation, develop a few coping statements for extra support.

People who prefer to give or match often feel pressured to lean in the taker direction when they perceive a workplace as zero-sum. Whether it’s a company with forced ranking systems, a group of firms vying to win the same clients, or a school with required grading curves and more demand than supply for desirable jobs, it’s only natural to assume that peers will lean more toward taking than giving. “When they anticipate self-interested behavior from others,” explains the Stanford psychologist Dale Miller, people fear that they’ll be exploited if they operate like givers, so they conclude that “pursuing a competitive orientation is the rational and appropriate thing to do.” There’s even evidence that just putting on a business suit and analyzing a Harvard Business School case is enough to significantly reduce the attention that people pay to relationships and the interests of others. The fear of exploitation by takers is so pervasive, writes the Cornell economist Robert Frank, that “by encouraging us to expect the worst in others it brings out the worst in us: dreading the role of the chump, we are often loath to heed our nobler instincts.

In teaching an honors writing class, I juxtaposed Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, an electronic hypertext fiction written in proprietary Storyspace software. Since these were honors students, many of them had already read Frankenstein and were, moreover, practiced in close reading and literary analysis. When it came to digital reading, however, they were accustomed to the scanning and fast skimming typical of hyper reading; they therefore expected that it might take them, oh, half an hour to go through Jackson’s text. They were shocked when I told them a reasonable time to spend with Jackson’s text was about the time it would take them to read Frankenstein, say, ten hours or so. I divided them into teams and assigned a section of Jackson’s text to each team, telling them that I wanted them to discover all the lexias (i.e., blocks of digital text) in their section and warning them that the Storyspace software allows certain lexias to be hidden until others are read. Finally, I asked them to diagram interrelations between lexias, drawing on all three views that the Storyspace software enables. As a consequence, the students were not only required to read closely but also to analyze the narrative strategies Jackson uses to construct her text.

assessing Ronald Reagan. There are so many basic questions that even his friends cannot quite figure out, such as (to start with the most basic one): Was he smart? From the brilliant-versus-clueless question flows even more complex ones. Was he a visionary who clung to a few verities, or an amiable dunce who floated obliviously above facts and nuances? Was he a stubborn ideological coot or a clever negotiator able to change course when dealing with Congress and the Soviets and movie moguls? Was he a historic figure who stemmed the tide of government expansion and stared down Moscow, or an out-of-touch actor who bloated the deficit and deserves less credit than Gorbachev for ending the cold war? The most solidly reported biography of Reagan so far—indeed, the only solidly reported biography—is by the scrupulously fair newspaperman Lou Cannon, who has covered him since the 1960s. Edmund Morris, who with great literary flair captured the life of Theodore Roosevelt, was given the access to write an authorized biography, but he became flummoxed by the topic; he took an erratic swing by producing Dutch, a semifictionalized ruminative bio-memoir, thus fouling off his precious opportunity. Both Garry Wills in his elegant 1987 sociobiography, Reagan’s America, and Dinesh D’Souza in his 1997 delicate drypoint, Ronald Reagan, do a good job of analyzing why he was able to make such a successful connection with the American people.

The belief in the magical power of language is not unusual, both in mystical and academic literature. The Kabbalists -- Jewish mystics of Spain and Palestine -- believed that super-normal insight and power could be derived from properly combining the letters of the Divine Name. For example, Abu Aharon, an early Kabbalist who emigrated from Baghdad to Italy, was said to perform miracles through the power of the Sacred Names." "What kind of power are we talking about here?" "Most Kabbalists were theorists who were interested only in pure meditation. But there were so-called 'practical Kabbalists' who tried to apply the power of the Kabbalah in everyday life." "In other words, sorcerers." "Yes. These practical Kabbalists used a so-called 'archangelic alphabet,' derived from first-century Greek and Aramaic theurgic alphabets, which resembled cuneiform. The Kabbalists referred to this alphabet as 'eye writing,' because the letters were composed of lines and small circles, which resembled eyes." "Ones and zeroes." "Some Kabbalists divided up the letters of the alphabet according to where they were produced inside the mouth." "Okay. So as we would think of it, they were drawing a connection between the printed letter on the page and the neural connections that had to be invoked in order to pronounce it." "Yes. By analyzing the spelling of various words, they were able to draw what they thought were profound conclusions about their true, inner meaning and significance.

What is it that makes a person the very person that she is, herself alone and not another, an integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be—until she does not continue any longer, at least not unproblematically? I stare at the picture of a small child at a summer’s picnic, clutching her big sister’s hand with one tiny hand while in the other she has a precarious hold on a big slice of watermelon that she appears to be struggling to have intersect with the small o of her mouth. That child is me. But why is she me? I have no memory at all of that summer’s day, no privileged knowledge of whether that child succeeded in getting the watermelon into her mouth. It’s true that a smooth series of contiguous physical events can be traced from her body to mine, so that we would want to say that her body is mine; and perhaps bodily identity is all that our personal identity consists in. But bodily persistence over time, too, presents philosophical dilemmas. The series of contiguous physical events has rendered the child’s body so different from the one I glance down on at this moment; the very atoms that composed her body no longer compose mine. And if our bodies are dissimilar, our points of view are even more so. Mine would be as inaccessible to her—just let her try to figure out [Spinoza’s] Ethics—as hers is now to me. Her thought processes, prelinguistic, would largely elude me. Yet she is me, that tiny determined thing in the frilly white pinafore. She has continued to exist, survived her childhood illnesses, the near-drowning in a rip current on Rockaway Beach at the age of twelve, other dramas. There are presumably adventures that she—that is that I—can’t undergo and still continue to be herself. Would I then be someone else or would I just no longer be? Were I to lose all sense of myself—were schizophrenia or demonic possession, a coma or progressive dementia to remove me from myself—would it be I who would be undergoing those trials, or would I have quit the premises? Would there then be someone else, or would there be no one? Is death one of those adventures from which I can’t emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists. A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? In this passage from Betraying Spinoza, the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (to whom I am married) explains the philosophical puzzle of personal identity, one of the problems that engaged the Dutch-Jewish thinker who is the subject of her book.5 Like her fellow humanist Dawkins, Goldstein analyzes the vertiginous enigma of existence and death, but their styles could not be more different—a reminder of the diverse ways that the resources of language can be deployed to illuminate a topic.

While writing the article that reported these findings, Amos and I discovered that we enjoyed working together. Amos was always very funny, and in his presence I became funny as well, so we spent hours of solid work in continuous amusement. The pleasure we found in working together made us exceptionally patient; it is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored. Perhaps most important, we checked our critical weapons at the door. Both Amos and I were critical and argumentative, he even more than I, but during the years of our collaboration neither of us ever rejected out of hand anything the other said. Indeed, one of the great joys I found in the collaboration was that Amos frequently saw the point of my vague ideas much more clearly than I did. Amos was the more logical thinker, with an orientation to theory and an unfailing sense of direction. I was more intuitive and rooted in the psychology of perception, from which we borrowed many ideas. We were sufficiently similar to understand each other easily, and sufficiently different to surprise each other. We developed a routine in which we spent much of our working days together, often on long walks. For the next fourteen years our collaboration was the focus of our lives, and the work we did together during those years was the best either of us ever did. We quickly adopted a practice that we maintained for many years. Our research was a conversation, in which we invented questions and jointly examined our intuitive answers. Each question was a small experiment, and we carried out many experiments in a single day. We were not seriously looking for the correct answer to the statistical questions we posed. Our aim was to identify and analyze the intuitive answer, the first one that came to mind, the one we were tempted to make even when we knew it to be wrong. We believed—correctly, as it happened—that any intuition that the two of us shared would be shared by many other people as well, and that it would be easy to demonstrate its effects on judgments.

Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, always curious about new phenomena, once placed himself in a sensory deprivation tank and tried to leave his physical body. He was successful. He would later write that he felt that he had left his body, drifted into space, and saw his motionless body when he looked back. However, Feynman later concluded that this was probably just his imagination, caused by sensory deprivation. Neurologists who have studied this phenomenon have a more prosaic explanation. Dr. Olaf Blanke and his colleagues in Switzerland may have located the precise place in the brain that generates out-of-body experiences. One of his patients was a forty-three-year-old woman who suffered from debilitating seizures that came from her right temporal lobe. A grid of about one hundred electrodes was placed over her brain in order to locate the region responsible for her seizures. When the electrodes stimulated the area between the parietal and temporal lobes, she immediately had the sensation of leaving her body. “I see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk!” she exclaimed. She felt she was floating six feet above her body. When the electrodes were turned off, however, the out-of-body sensation disappeared immediately. In fact, Dr. Blanke found that he could turn the out-of-body sensation on and off, like a light switch, by repeatedly stimulating this area of the brain. As we saw in Chapter 9, temporal lobe epileptic lesions can induce the feeling that there are evil spirits behind every misfortune, so the concept of spirits leaving the body is perhaps part of our neural makeup. (This may also explain the presence of supernatural beings. When Dr. Blanke analyzed a twenty-two-year-old woman who was suffering from intractable seizures, he found that, by stimulating the temporoparietal area of the brain, he could induce the sensation that there was a shadowy presence behind her. She could describe this person, who even grabbed her arms, in detail. His position would change with each appearance, but he would always appear behind her.)

Rebecca Wallace-Segall, who teaches creative-writing workshops for kids and teens as director of Writopia Lab in New York City, says that the students who sign up for her classes “are often not the kids who are willing to talk for hours about fashion and celebrity. Those kids are less likely to come, perhaps because they’re less inclined to analyze and dig deep—that’s not their comfort zone. The so-called shy kids are often hungry to brainstorm ideas, deconstruct them, and act on them, and, paradoxically, when they’re allowed to interact this way, they’re not shy at all. They’re connecting with each other, but in a deeper zone, in a place that’s considered boring or tiresome by some of their peers.” And these kids do “come out” when they’re ready; most of the Writopia kids read their works at local bookstores, and a staggering number win prestigious national writing competitions. If your child is prone to overstimulation, then it’s also a good idea for her to pick activities like art or long-distance running, that depend less on performing under pressure. If she’s drawn to activities that require performance, though, you can help her thrive. When I was a kid, I loved figure skating. I could spend hours on the rink, tracing figure eights, spinning happily, or flying through the air. But on the day of my competitions, I was a wreck. I hadn’t slept the night before and would often fall during moves that I had sailed through in practice. At first I believed what people told me—that I had the jitters, just like everybody else. But then I saw a TV interview with the Olympic gold medalist Katarina Witt. She said that pre-competition nerves gave her the adrenaline she needed to win the gold. I knew then that Katarina and I were utterly different creatures, but it took me decades to figure out why. Her nerves were so mild that they simply energized her, while mine were constricting enough to make me choke. At the time, my very supportive mother quizzed the other skating moms about how their own daughters handled pre-competition anxiety, and came back with insights that she hoped would make me feel better. Kristen’s nervous too, she reported. Renée’s mom says she’s scared the night before a competition. But I knew Kristen and Renée well, and I was certain that they weren’t as frightened as I was

A famous British writer is revealed to be the author of an obscure mystery novel. An immigrant is granted asylum when authorities verify he wrote anonymous articles critical of his home country. And a man is convicted of murder when he’s connected to messages painted at the crime scene. The common element in these seemingly disparate cases is “forensic linguistics”—an investigative technique that helps experts determine authorship by identifying quirks in a writer’s style. Advances in computer technology can now parse text with ever-finer accuracy. Consider the recent outing of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling as the writer of The Cuckoo’s Calling , a crime novel she published under the pen name Robert Galbraith. England’s Sunday Times , responding to an anonymous tip that Rowling was the book’s real author, hired Duquesne University’s Patrick Juola to analyze the text of Cuckoo , using software that he had spent over a decade refining. One of Juola’s tests examined sequences of adjacent words, while another zoomed in on sequences of characters; a third test tallied the most common words, while a fourth examined the author’s preference for long or short words. Juola wound up with a linguistic fingerprint—hard data on the author’s stylistic quirks. He then ran the same tests on four other books: The Casual Vacancy , Rowling’s first post-Harry Potter novel, plus three stylistically similar crime novels by other female writers. Juola concluded that Rowling was the most likely author of The Cuckoo’s Calling , since she was the only one whose writing style showed up as the closest or second-closest match in each of the tests. After consulting an Oxford linguist and receiving a concurring opinion, the newspaper confronted Rowling, who confessed. Juola completed his analysis in about half an hour. By contrast, in the early 1960s, it had taken a team of two statisticians—using what was then a state-of-the-art, high-speed computer at MIT—three years to complete a project to reveal who wrote 12 unsigned Federalist Papers. Robert Leonard, who heads the forensic linguistics program at Hofstra University, has also made a career out of determining authorship. Certified to serve as an expert witness in 13 states, he has presented evidence in cases such as that of Christopher Coleman, who was arrested in 2009 for murdering his family in Waterloo, Illinois. Leonard testified that Coleman’s writing style matched threats spray-painted at his family’s home (photo, left). Coleman was convicted and is serving a life sentence. Since forensic linguists deal in probabilities, not certainties, it is all the more essential to further refine this field of study, experts say. “There have been cases where it was my impression that the evidence on which people were freed or convicted was iffy in one way or another,” says Edward Finegan, president of the International Association of Forensic Linguists. Vanderbilt law professor Edward Cheng, an expert on the reliability of forensic evidence, says that linguistic analysis is best used when only a handful of people could have written a given text. As forensic linguistics continues to make headlines, criminals may realize the importance of choosing their words carefully. And some worry that software also can be used to obscure distinctive written styles. “Anything that you can identify to analyze,” says Juola, “I can identify and try to hide.

The slaves selected to go to the Great House Farm, for the monthly allowance for themselves and their fellow-slaves, were peculiarly enthusiastic. While on their way, they would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that came up, came out—if not in the word, in the sound;—and as frequently in the one as in the other. They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone. Into all of their songs they would manage to weave something of the Great House Farm. Especially would they do this, when leaving home. They would then sing most exultingly the following words:— "I am going away to the Great House Farm! O, yea! O, yea! O!" This they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves. I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do. I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul,—and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because "there is no flesh in his obdurate heart." I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.

The easiest way to write a book is to use the Table of Contents as an outline. People get stuck when they think in terms of writing a book. Do not let this delay you. There are a lot of book outline writing software’s available today, but I personally believe they have the potential to cause more distraction then assistance. The best possible outlines have come from pure "flow". I advise my clients to do a simple process of setting the timer for 2 minutes and just writing. I ask that they write everything that pops into their heads without thought or judgment on the subject. The questions I ask are: What is most important to you? What do you know a lot about? Tell me 12 things that fall under that subject that are valuable to know. Under each of the 12 things, give me 3 things that are a "must" in that category. Using index cards to write your answers on is a useful way to arrange chapters and sections of your book. Believe it or not, my students have come up with a Table of Contents/outline in less than 10 minutes using this method. Our greatest block is that we tend to over think things too much. We over analyze and what happens is that we get into analysis paralysis. Our creativity and ‘flow’ freezes up and all spontaneity and creativity just exits out of the thought process. When we stall the creative flow by trying to be correct, proper and appropriate, we end up talking ourselves out of what we intuitively know that we know and into a space of doubt, or what we think we do not know.

Remember to write continuously the entire twenty minutes. And never forget that this writing is for you and you alone. At the conclusion of your twenty minutes of writing, read the section “Post-writing thoughts” and complete the post-writing questionnaire. Post-Writing Thoughts Following the Day One Writing Session Congratulations! You have completed the first day of writing. After each writing exercise, it can be helpful to make objective assessments about how the writing felt. In this way, you can go back and determine which writing methods are most effective for you. For this and for all future writing exercises, respond to each of the five following questions either at the end of your writing or in a separate place. Put a number between 0 and 10 by each question. 0 — Not at all 1 2 3 4 5— Somewhat 6 7 8 9 10— A great deal ____ A. To what degree did you express your deepest thoughts and feelings? ____ B. To what degree do you currently feel sad or upset? ____ C. To what degree do you currently feel happy? ____ D. To what degree was today’s writing valuable and meaningful for you? E. Briefly describe how your writing went today so you may refer to this later. For many people, the first day of writing is the most difficult. This kind of writing can bring up emotions and thoughts that you may not have known that you had. It may also have flowed much more easily than you expected — especially if you wrote about something that you have been keeping to yourself for a long time. If you don’t want anyone to see your writing, keep the pages in a secure place or destroy them. If keeping them is not a problem, you can go back and analyze the pages at the end of the four days of writing. Now, take some time for yourself. Until tomorrow.

Table 6.1 Skill Categories Skill Category Description Comment Determining the Meaning of Words (Word Meaning) Student determines the meaning of words in context by recognizing known words and connecting them to prior vocabulary knowledge. Student uses a variety of skills to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words, including pronouncing words to trigger recognition, searching for related words with similar meanings, and analyzing prefixes, roots, and suffixes. This skill category includes more than just lexical access, as word identification and lexical recall are combined with morphological analyses. Understanding the Content, Form, and Function of Sentences (Sentence Meaning) Student builds upon an understanding of words and phrases to determine the meaning of a sentence. Student analyzes sentence structures and draws on an understanding of grammar rules to determine how the parts of speech in a sentence operate together to support the overall meaning. Student confirms that his or her understanding of a sentence makes sense in relationship to previous sentences, personal experience, and general knowledge of the world. This skill category focuses on the syntactical, grammatical, and semantic case analyses that support elementary proposition encoding and integration of propositions across contiguous sentences. Understanding the Situation Implied by a Text (Situation Model) Student develops a mental model (i.e., image, conception) of the people, things, setting, actions, ideas, and events in a text. Student draws on personal experience and world knowledge to infer cause-and-effect relationships between actions and events to fill in additional information needed to understand the situation implied by the text. This skill category is a hybrid of the explicit text model and the elaborated situation model described by Kintsch (1998). As such, category three combines both lower-level explicit text interpretation and higher-level inferential processes that connect the explicit text to existing knowledge structures and schemata. Understanding the Content, Form, and Function of Larger Sections of Text (Global Text Meaning) Student synthesizes the meaning of multiple sentences into an understanding of paragraphs or larger sections of texts. Student recognizes a text’s organizational structure and uses that organization to guide his or her reading. Student can identify the main point of, summarize, characterize, or evaluate the meaning of larger sections of text. Student can identify underlying assumptions in a text, recognize implied consequences, and draw conclusions from a text. This skill category focuses on the integration of local propositions into macro-level text structures (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978) and more global themes (Louwerse & Van Peer, 2003). It also includes elaborative inferencing that supports interpretation and critical comprehension, such as identifying assumptions, causes, and consequence and drawing conclusions at the level of the situation model. Analyzing Authors’ Purposes, Goals, and Strategies (Pragmatic Meaning) Student identifies an author’s intended audience and purposes for writing. Student analyzes an author’s choices regarding content, organization, style, and genre, evaluating how those choices support the author’s purpose and are appropriate for the intended audience and situation. This skill category includes contextual and pragmatic discourse analyses that support interpretation of texts in light of inferred authorial intentions and strategies.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Judges generally use one of three philosophical methods to interpret the U. S. Constitution: Strict construction, which interprets the document to mean exactly what it states and nothing more or less. Historical approach, which interprets the Constitution by analyzing its history and what was meant at the time of its writing. Liberal (or Progressive) approach, which views the Constitution as a “living document” in the sense that its words and phrases must be interpreted in light of our modern desires and the needs of our modern society and not according to the intent of its authors.

Do try it on,” Cassandra urged. Despite Kathleen’s refusal, the girls insisted on draping it over her shoulders, just to see how it looked. “How beautiful,” Helen said, beaming. It was the most luxurious fabric she had ever felt, the fleece soft and cushiony. Kathleen ran her hand across the rich hues, and sighed. “I suppose I can’t ruin it with aniline dye,” she muttered. “But I’m going to tell him that I did.” “You’re going to lie?” Cassandra asked, her eyes wide. “That’s not setting a very good example for us.” “He must be discouraged from sending unsuitable gifts,” Kathleen said. “It’s not his fault if he doesn’t know any better,” Pandora pointed out. “He knows the rules,” Kathleen said darkly. “And he enjoys breaking them.” My Lord, It was very kind of you to send the lovely gift which is very useful now that the weather has turned. I am pleased to relate that the cashmere absorbed an application of black dye quite evenly so that it is now appropriate for mourning. Thank you for your thoughtfulness. Lady Trenear “You dyed it?” Devon asked aloud, setting the note on his desk with mixture of amusement and irritation. Reaching for a silver penholder, he inserted a fresh nib and pulled a sheet of writing paper from a nearby stack. That morning he had already written a half-dozen missives to lawyers, his banker, and contractors, and had hired an outside agent to analyze the estate’s finances. He grimaced at the sight of his ink-stained fingers. The lemon-and-salt paste his valet had given him wouldn’t entirely remove the smudges. He was tired of writing, and even more so of numbers, and Kathleen’s letter was a welcome distraction. The challenge could not go unanswered.

My Lord, It was very kind of you to send the lovely gift which is very useful now that the weather has turned. I am pleased to relate that the cashmere absorbed an application of black dye quite evenly so that it is now appropriate for mourning. Thank you for your thoughtfulness. Lady Trenear “You dyed it?” Devon asked aloud, setting the note on his desk with mixture of amusement and irritation. Reaching for a silver penholder, he inserted a fresh nib and pulled a sheet of writing paper from a nearby stack. That morning he had already written a half-dozen missives to lawyers, his banker, and contractors, and had hired an outside agent to analyze the estate’s finances. He grimaced at the sight of his ink-stained fingers. The lemon-and-salt paste his valet had given him wouldn’t entirely remove the smudges. He was tired of writing, and even more so of numbers, and Kathleen’s letter was a welcome distraction. The challenge could not go unanswered. Staring down at the letter with a faint smile, Deon pondered the best way to annoy her. Dipping the pen nib into the inkwell, he wrote, Madam, I am delighted to learn that you find the shawl useful in these cooler days of autumn. On that subject, I am writing to inform you of my recent decision to donate all the black curtains that currently shroud the windows at Eversby Priory to a London charitable organization. Although you will regrettably no longer have use of the cloth, it will be made into winter coats for the poor, which I am sure you will agree is a far nobler purpose. I am confident in your ability to find other ways of making the atmosphere at Eversby Priory appropriately grim and cheerless. If I do not receive the curtains promptly, I will take it to mean that you are eager for my assistance, in which case I will be delighted to oblige you by coming to Hampshire at once. Trenear Kathleen’s reply was delivered a week later, along with massive crates containing the black curtains.

With mindfulness the rumour is wrong that the point is to empty your mind; you need your mind to analyze, memorize, create and most importantly exist. It can never be empty while you’re alive, even in a coma your mind is still chattering away. The trick is to learn to live with the unrelenting sound track. It isn’t easy. Mindfulness is like training in a mental boot camp, it is not for the fainthearted because the mind is like a wild animal demanding you obey its every whim. And you’ve become so used to being the slave, you obey, ‘Gotta do this, gotta write email, gotta garden, gotta learn judo, gotta row across the Atlantic.’ The ‘gottas’ never stop and we always do as we are told. It’s so much easier to go along with what you’re used to; certainty is less threatening than uncertainty even if you suffer because of it.

Writing requires a prolong period of academic education supplemented by studiously scrutinizing society and its customs. Writers also analyze their own nature and physical surroundings, a self-directed exploration of their internal and external environment.

Narrative writing about the self is a chiral process, not a symmetrical, achiral process. An object or a system is chiral if a person cannot superpose the object upon its exhibited mirror image. Although narrative writing is an embodiment of the self, human beings’ predilection to simplify data through imposition of a narrative arc over complex sets of data typically leads to an imprecise replication. The only way to avoid the narrative fallacy is by examining the clarity of the story and methodically assessing the narrator’s reliability in collecting, analyzing, presenting facts and the validity of the narrative including the objective aspect, the emotional aspect, social aspect, and moral aspect.

There are three types of business writing. The first is breaking news. That's what Reuters does -- just the facts. The second is analyzing news, or putting those basic facts into context. Think New York Times and Wall Street Journal. The third is taking existing facts and analysis and presenting them in a way that causes readers to think differently about a topic. That's what I try to do when I write.

among their diverse talents, is a trauma specialist. Freddie gave me some useful pointers about unlocking nuggets of information buried within the amygdala, the almond-shaped part of the brain where emotions are remembered, analyzed and attached to associations. One of the most invaluable resources that helped us construct this memoir was the contribution to the Yizkor book of Machel Grossman, Tova’s father. For giving us permission to quote liberally from Machel’s writing, I am indebted to JewishGen, the global home of Jewish genealogy, which owns the translation. I am also grateful for the generosity of Kirsten Gradel, widow of Morris Gradel, a distinguished Yiddish

IA automates knowledge workers’ activities by mimicking four main capabilities: Vision (e.g., viewing the environment, recognizing objects and signs), Execution (e.g., typing, clicking, filling in forms, and authenticating), Language (e.g., using language to read, speak, write, and interact), and Thinking and learning (e.g., analyzing, creating insight, predicting, making decisions, and adjusting).

(He typically divides the writing of a scholarly paper into three discrete tasks: analyzing the data, writing a full draft, and editing the draft into something publishable.)

Learning Plan Template Before Entry Find out whatever you can about the organization’s strategy, structure, performance, and people. Look for external assessments of the performance of the organization. You will learn how knowledgeable, fairly unbiased people view it. If you are a manager at a lower level, talk to people who deal with your new group as suppliers or customers. Find external observers who know the organization well, including former employees, recent retirees, and people who have transacted business with the organization. Ask these people open-ended questions about history, politics, and culture. Talk with your predecessor if possible. Talk to your new boss. As you begin to learn about the organization, write down your first impressions and eventually some hypotheses. Compile an initial set of questions to guide your structured inquiry after you arrive. Soon After Entry Review detailed operating plans, performance data, and personnel data. Meet one-on-one with your direct reports and ask them the questions you compiled. You will learn about convergent and divergent views and about your reports as people. Assess how things are going at key interfaces. You will hear how salespeople, purchasing agents, customer service representatives, and others perceive your organization’s dealings with external constituencies. You will also learn about problems they see that others do not. Test strategic alignment from the top down. Ask people at the top what the company’s vision and strategy are. Then see how far down into the organizational hierarchy those beliefs penetrate. You will learn how well the previous leader drove vision and strategy down through the organization. Test awareness of challenges and opportunities from the bottom up. Start by asking frontline people how they view the company’s challenges and opportunities. Then work your way up. You will learn how well the people at the top check the pulse of the organization. Update your questions and hypotheses. Meet with your boss to discuss your hypotheses and findings. By the End of the First Month Gather your team to feed back to them your preliminary findings. You will elicit confirmation and challenges of your assessments and will learn more about the group and its dynamics. Now analyze key interfaces from the outside in. You will learn how people on the outside (suppliers, customers, distributors, and others) perceive your organization and its strengths and weaknesses. Analyze a couple of key processes. Convene representatives of the responsible groups to map out and evaluate the processes you selected. You will learn about productivity, quality, and reliability. Meet with key integrators. You will learn how things work at interfaces among functional areas. What problems do they perceive that others do not? Seek out the natural historians. They can fill you in on the history, culture, and politics of the organization, and they are also potential allies and influencers. Update your questions and hypotheses. Meet with your boss again to discuss your observations.

change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

We are a species that delights in story. We look out on reality, we grasp patterns, and we join them into narratives that can captivate, inform, startle, amuse, and thrill. The plural—narratives—is utterly essential. In the library of human reflection, there is no single, unified volume that conveys ultimate understanding. Instead, we have written many nested stories that probe different domains of human inquiry and experience: stories, that is, that parse the patterns of reality using different grammars and vocabularies. Protons, neutrons, electrons, and nature’s other particles are essential for telling the reductionist story, analyzing the stuff of reality, from planets to Picasso, in terms of their microphysical constituents. Metabolism, replication, mutation, and adaptation are essential for telling the story of life’s emergence and development, analyzing the biochemical workings of remarkable molecules and the cells they govern. Neurons, information, thought, and awareness are essential for the story of mind—and with that the narratives proliferate: myth to religion, literature to philosophy, art to music, telling of humankind’s struggle for survival, will to understand, urge for expression, and search for meaning. These are all ongoing stories, developed by thinkers hailing from a great range of distinct disciplines. Understandably so. A saga that ranges from quarks to consciousness is a hefty chronicle. Still, the different stories are interlaced. Don Quixote speaks to humankind’s yearning for the heroic, told through the fragile Alonso Quijano, a character created in the imagination of Miguel de Cervantes, a living, breathing, thinking, sensing, feeling collection of bone, tissue, and cells that, during his lifetime, supported organic processes of energy transformation and waste excretion, which themselves relied on atomic and molecular movements honed by billions of years of evolution on a planet forged from the detritus of supernova explosions scattered throughout a realm of space emerging from the big bang. Yet to read Don Quixote’s travails is to gain an understanding of human nature that would remain opaque if embedded in a description of the movements of the knight-errant’s molecules and atoms or conveyed through an elaboration of the neuronal processes crackling in Cervantes’s mind while writing the novel. Connected though they surely are, different stories, told with different languages and focused on different levels of reality, provide vastly different insights.

Pick a passage. You can do this randomly (my favorite method) or look up a passage that suits your concerns of the day, or go to your favorite book of the Bible. Still your mind and invite God, the Holy Spirit, or whatever you want to call the Divine, to speak to you through your reading. You can say this out loud or within. ​“Then, read the passage until a word or phrase jumps off the page. You may have to read one verse, several verses, or just a few words until this happens. Use your heart to sense it, not your mind. Don’t analyze or think, ‘Oh, I know the origin of that word, I’ll choose that one.’ Let the words do the work of jumping. ​“When the word jumps, take it into your heart. Let it work in there until you start to hear or see something. Let the words or pictures flow in your imagination. Try not to let your analytical mind hijack the flow. Let the words paint the images or realizations via the subconscious, or whatever you want to call that intuitive part of you. When the flow slows or stops, grab your journal and write. Write fluidly as if you are letting the flow continue. Don’t judge your words or ideas. That’s not your job here. You are a pen in God’s hand. Write what comes.

Unlike modern historians, who analyze the proximate reason why things happen and strive for even-handedness, biblical writers reflected on events' ultimate meanings and sided with those who promoted the One God's worship against backsliders and idolaters. This perspective yielded the radical insight that God evaluates human behavior morally and favors the just, even though they may not triumph in the world like the Assyrians and the Babylonians—victors who, according to adage, write history on their own terms.

It’s hard to write clearly. In fact, it’s hard to find someone who can teach you how to write clearly. Schools tend to spend more time teaching pupils how to sound smart, or how to analyze Shakespearian prose, than how to be understood. Students are more likely to be told to memorize poetry than to carry out a readability test. This is a disservice. Poetry can be life-enriching, but the purpose of almost all writing is to communicate information.

If you are right, then everything we learned before and all the books we have, are wrong", said my students of biology in a class on academic writing, with expressions of trauma at what I was telling them. "But we use the same books as the students in the United States" they continued, trying to stop themselves from seeing the obvious truth. Because for those who have lived an entire life as a lie, the truth is indeed traumatic. You need a very high level of sanity to confront it, which is why I find it to be a funny coincidence when the crazy ones tell you that you are crazy for seeing the truth that they themselves are too afraid to analyze. They don't want to analyze it because, well, they may realize that the truth is true. They can't deal with such outcome. They would rather see you dead first.

You see, Miss Winnow…Roman has always been drawn to stories and words. Ever since he was a lad, sneaking into my library to steal books off the shelves. It’s why my mother-in-law gave him a typewriter for his tenth birthday, because he dreams of being a ‘novelist’. Of writing something that matters to others. It’s why he wanted to go to university and spend his hours doing nothing more than analyzing other people’s thoughts and trying to pen his own.

LOCAL SELF AS HOST FOR NONLOCAL SELF When you drop back into your daily life after meditation, you’re changed. You’ve communed with nonlocal mind for an hour, experiencing the highest possible cadence of who you are. That High Self version of you rearranges neurons in your head to create a physical structure to anchor it. You now have a brain that accommodates both the local self and the nonlocal self. My experience has been that the longer you spend in Bliss Brain, whether in or out of meditation, the greater the volume of neural tissue available to anchor that transcendent self in physical experience. Once a critical mass of neurons has wired together, a tipping point occurs. You begin to flash spontaneously into Bliss Brain throughout your day. When you’re idle for a while, like being stuck in traffic or standing in line at the grocery store, the most natural activity seems to be to go into Bliss Brain for a few moments. This reminds you, in the middle of everyday life, that the nonlocal component of your Self exists. It also brings all the enhanced creativity, productivity, and problem-solving ability of Bliss Brain to bear on your daily tasks. You become a happy, creative, and effective person. These enhanced capabilities render you much more able to cope with the challenges of life. They don’t confer exceptional luck. When everyone’s house burns down, yours does too. When the economy nosedives, it takes you with it. But because you possess resilience, and a daily experience of your nonlocal self, you take it in stride. Even when external things vanish, you still have the neural network that Bliss Brain created. No one can take that away from you. DEEPENING PRACTICES Here are practices you can do this week to integrate the information in this chapter into your life: Posttraumatic Growth Exercise 1: In your journal, write down the names of the most resilient people you’ve known personally. They can be alive or dead. They’re people who’ve gone through tragedy and come out intact. Make an appointment to spend time with at least two of the living ones in the coming month. Listen to their stories and allow inspiration to fill you. Neural Reconsolidation Exercise: This week, after a particularly deep meditation, savor the experience. Set a timer and lie down for 15 to 30 minutes. Visualize your synapses wiring together as you deliberately fire them by remembering the deliciousness of the meditation. Choices Exercise: Make 10 photocopies of illustration 7.4, the two doors. Next, analyze in what areas of your environment you often make negative choices. Maybe it’s in online meetings with an annoying colleague at work. Maybe it’s the food choices you make when you walk to the fridge. Maybe it’s the movies you watch on your TV. Tape a copy of the two doors illustration to those objects, such as the monitor, fridge, or TV. This will help you remember, when you’re under stress, that you have a choice.

ago, the idea that microorganisms in the human gut could influence the brain was often dismissed as wild…Not any more.” The study that inspired the editors to write this piece analyzed bacteria in the feces of more than 2,000 Belgians.[31] Of over 500 strains of bacteria they tested, more than 90 percent were able to produce neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin that play a key role in regulating human moods. As this ability is unique to bacteria that live in the bodies of animals, it seems that these microbes have evolved over millions of years to create chemical messengers which allow them to communicate with and influence their hosts. The evolutionary reason why bacteria produce chemicals that improve our moods may be that it makes us more likely to be gregarious and therefore provide them with opportunities to colonize other hosts.

This debate is important for analyzing the future of AI. The idea that our minds are computers is the ultimate argument supporting that artificial general intelligence is possible; all it takes is to scan a brain and use it as a template to build an equivalent computer. Philosopher Nick Bostrom writes, “The availability of the brain as template provides strong support for the claim that machine intelligence is ultimately feasible […] Intelligent software would be produced by scanning and closely modeling the computational structure of a biological brain.”78 So, according to this argument, since our minds are just computers, it is, in principle, possible to someday build computers that can do anything a human can do (but it could take a while).

Thus, it is suggested, a deeper understanding of the conditions affecting the speed and ultimate extent of an innovation's diffusion is to be obtained only by explicitly analyzing the specific choice of technique problem which its advent would have presented to objectively dissimilar members of the relevant (historical) population of potential adopters.

Our constant concern, in writing regulations, was to preserve financial stability without constraining credit or economic growth any more than necessary. Two years earlier, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon had asked me at a public forum whether we had calculated the cumulative economic effect of all the new rules we were putting into place. We did as a matter of course attempt to analyze the costs and benefits of individual rules, and even groups of related rules, but I told him that a comprehensive calculation wasn’t practical. My answer wasn’t very satisfying, and Jamie’s willingness to challenge me in public on behalf of his fellow bankers made him a short-lived hero on Wall Street. A better answer would have been to point out to Jamie the immeasurable economic and human cost of failing to write adequately tough rules and permitting a repeat of the crisis we had recently endured.

Quigley’s quest for simplicity in history did not preclude his recognition of its complexity. Instead of surrendering to historical complexity as an insurmountable obstacle and retreating to an historicism that would obviate the development of paradigms, Quigley confronted complexity head-on and sought to recognize it as an integral part of historical method. He realized that while reductionism is possible with the physical sciences, any such attempt at dissecting an historical phenomena and isolating and analyzing only one factor as an independent variable is impossible in the social sciences. Thus, Quigley studied the whole context of a phenomena, a method developed by the theoretical biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy termed “general systems theory” 10 This “generalism” became known as “holisticism” and operationalized as “macrohistory.” By “holisticism”, Quigley meant that the “whole” of reality held greater meaning than the sum of its parts, thus scholars should tend towards general studies to understand general and comparative historical concepts and paradigms rather than the hyperspecialization pervading the discipline of history.11

Poker players tend to overly focus on money immediately after a session because it matters most in the long run and it’s so easy to calculate. The problem is that because of variance, monetary results alone are unreliable measures in the short term of how you played. Here are a few better ways to evaluate how you played: Look closely at tough decisions to see how you played them. Estimate how much variance influenced results. Calculate whether you accomplished the qualitative goals you set before the session. If you fell short, why? Review how you did in the areas you’re trying to improve (poker strategy and mental game). Did you see any progress? If you’re going to analyze hands later, write some game flow notes or thoughts about them that you may otherwise forget. Spending a short time to evaluate is also a great way to: Put poker down when you’re done playing, so you can go on with your life. Reset your mind before the next time you play.