Cultivation Novel Quotes

Politeness is the first thing people lose once they get the power.

Marriage should be no prison, but a garden in which something higher is cultivated.

No matter how thoroughly Lan Wangji was praised as an unrivaled rare beauty, nothing could help the fact they he looked profoundly embittered, as if he had lost his wife.

If you walk the night road too often, sooner or later, you'll run into ghosts.

Who was right, who was wrong, was there more gratitude or more grievance - is that something an outsider can determine?

Maybe, I thought, I’ve given too much weight to the cultivated use of reason, to good reading, to well controlled language, to political affiliation; maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.

Young man, sometimes in life there are a few sappy things one must say.” “What?” Jin Ling asked. ”’Thank you’ and ‘I’m sorry’,” Wei Wuxian replied “there’ll come a day when you’ll say them through tears.

Only in the presence of your fated person, in the presence of the one your heart belongs to, can you allow yourself to be free of restraint.

Making reality real is art's responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader's illusion.

No one could be worshiped on the divine altar forever. Legends were merely legends.

Don’t attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention because you’re lonely. Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way. (movie & novel combination)

It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.

Lan Zhan,” he called. “Look at me. Quick, look at me!” Wei Wuxian was calling to him with a smile on his lips. Just as he always had, Lan Wangji looked at him. And forever after, his eyes could never move away from him again.

The boy was gentle in disposition, refined and elegant, noble in his bearing with a light grin curving the corners of his lips.

No, Mo Ran. Think about it. Let go of your vicious hatred and look back properly. He once trained you in cultivation and martial arts, trained you in the art of self-defense. He once taught you how to read and write, taught you poetry and painting. He once learned how to cook just for you, even though he was so clumsy and got cuts all over his hands. He once… He once waited every day for you to come home, all alone by himself, from nightfall…till the break of dawn…

You took advantage of his blindness! Woe upon him, beset by your lies!

Genius is a word that is very loosely used nowadays. It is ascribed to persons to whom a more sober judgement would be satisfied to allow talent. Genius and talent are very different things. Many people have talent; it is not rare: genius is. Talent is adroit and dexterous; it can be cultivated; genius is innate, and too often strangely allied to grave defects. But what is genius?

Then four days! Can we change it to once every four days? If four days won’t do, we could do every three days too!” Lan Wangji’s voice was both strong and resonant as he declared: “Every day means every day.

Lan Wangji furrowed his brow and shook his head. It was a while before he replied, quietly, “Xiongzhang. I want to bring someone back to the Cloud Recesses.” Lan Xichen was astonished. “Bring someone back to the Cloud Recesses?” Lan Wangji nodded. His thoughts clearly weighed heavily on him. After a brief pause, he added, “Bring him back…and hide him away.

¿Por qué una persona viva se preocuparía de lo que ocurre después de la muerte? Simplemente viviré libremente el mayor tiempo que se me sea posible.

Lan Zhan, when I said I wanted to sleep with you every day, can you pretend you never heard me?

Wei Wuxian couldn’t speak another word. In the blackness, Lan Wangji had seized him and pulled him into a tight embrace that sealed his mouth against his chest.

When he whisked you away and hid you inside that cave, the way he spoke to you, the way he looked at you…even if you were blind or deaf, it would have been impossible not to understand his feelings.

Lan Xichen! All my life, I’ve lied to countless people and I’ve harmed countless others. It’s just like you said. I killed my father, killed my brothers, killed my wife, killed my son, killed my teachers, killed my friends—I’ve committed every crime there is!” He inhaled deeply, then rasped out, “But never have I ever wanted to hurt you!

The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room. Thus there may be a covert, betraying link between the cultivation of aesthetic response and the potential of personal inhumanity.

Cans. We don't have to think anymore. Everything is premeditated, pre-chewed, pre-felt. Cans. All you have to do is open them. Delivered to your home three times a day. Nothing any more to cultivate yourself, or let grow and boil on the fire of questions, of doubt, and of desire. Cans.

Suddenly, Wei Wuxian cut in. “Lan Zhan! I…I have something to say to you.” “Wait until later,” Jin Guangyao said. “No, it’s urgent,” Wei Wuxian insisted. “Then you can say it as you are,” Jin Guangyao said. While that was only an offhand statement, realization dawned on Wei Wuxian. “You’re right,” he said. Then he yelled, with all the breath he could pull into his lungs, “Lan Zhan! Lan Wangji! Hanguang-jun! I…I genuinely wanted to sleep with you earlier!

No doubt you've experienced something similar in books, movies, novels–whatever you use as an excuse to get away, to suspend reality. Literary characters, like these projections, draw you in and cultivate feelings of friendship on your part. Although, no matter how much you learn about them, how much time you spend with them–how far you can see into their thoughts and words, how they interact with others, their looks, what they wear–they will never, ever know you.

Don’t attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention because you’re lonely. Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. And intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way. (Book AND movie combination.)

Nestled in the crook of Lan Wangji’s arms, Wei Wuxian replied, “Of course there is. For example, I don’t want to tear myself away from Lan Zhan right now. How is that the same as being scared of tearing myself away from Lan Zhan?” After a brief moment of thought, he added, “Sorry, I take that back. Maybe those two things are pretty much the same.

¿Por qué una persona viva se preocuparía de lo que ocurre después de la muerte? Simplemente viviré libremente el mayor tiempo que me sea posible.

Wei Wuxian jumped off the bed and wrapped his arms tightly around the still-covered Lan Wangji, then pushed him onto the bed. “Rape!

I always greet others with a smile, even though I might not receive one in kind - Jin Guangyao

Hide him away?” Lan Xichen pressed. Lan Wangji wrinkled his brow. “But he is unwilling.

Wei Wuxian seized Lan Wangji by the shoulders. “But! But from now on, I’ll remember everything you’ve said to me, everything you’ve done. I won’t forget a thing!” “…” “You’re especially wonderful. I like you,” Wei Wuxian said. “…” “Or, in other words—I fancy you, I love you, I want you, I can’t leave you, I whatever you.” “…” “I want to go on Night Hunts with you for the rest of my life.

It is foolish to wish for beauty. Sensible people never either desire it for themselves or care about it in others. If the mind be but well cultivated, and the heart well disposed, no one ever cares for the exterior.

What you read and how deeply you read matters almost as much as how you love, work, exercise, vote, practice charity, strive for social justice, cultivate kindness and courtesy, worship if you are capable of worship. The mind is an activity and will decay into dark inertia if not sustained by the sustenance of reading. The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living, even when submerged under forty fathoms of bother and distress. If you live ninety years you will be a battered survivor. Your own mistakes, accidents, failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.

Han…Hanguang-jun, Wei-qianbei!” Wei Wuxian propped his arms on the donkey’s head. “Sizhui, my boy. I’m eloping with your clan’s Hanguang-jun. What are you following us for? Aren’t you scared of being yelled at by Lan-lao-xiansheng?

I also want to sleep with you every day. I swear this isn’t a whim—I’m not messing with you, like I have in the past, and I’m also definitely not saying this because I feel like I owe you something. No more of that nonsense. I just really like you so much that I want to sleep with you. I don’t want anyone else but you. It has to be you. You can do anything you want to me, have your way with me however you see fit—I’ll like it, no matter what. As long as you’re willing to be with me—

Now and then I am asked as to "what books a statesman should read," and my answer is, poetry and novels—including short stories under the head of novels. I don't mean that he should read only novels and modern poetry. If he cannot also enjoy the Hebrew prophets and the Greek dramatists, he should be sorry. He ought to read interesting books on history and government, and books of science and philosophy; and really good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever written in prose or verse. Gibbon and Macaulay, Herodotus, Thucydides and Tacitus, the Heimskringla, Froissart, Joinville and Villehardouin, Parkman and Mahan, Mommsen and Ranke—why! there are scores and scores of solid histories, the best in the world, which are as absorbing as the best of all the novels, and of as permanent value. The same thing is true of Darwin and Huxley and Carlyle and Emerson, and parts of Kant, and of volumes like Sutherland's "Growth of the Moral Instinct," or Acton's Essays and Lounsbury's studies—here again I am not trying to class books together, or measure one by another, or enumerate one in a thousand of those worth reading, but just to indicate that any man or woman of some intelligence and some cultivation can in some line or other of serious thought, scientific or historical or philosophical or economic or governmental, find any number of books which are charming to read, and which in addition give that for which his or her soul hungers. I do not for a minute mean that the statesman ought not to read a great many different books of this character, just as every one else should read them. But, in the final event, the statesman, and the publicist, and the reformer, and the agitator for new things, and the upholder of what is good in old things, all need more than anything else to know human nature, to know the needs of the human soul; and they will find this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry.

Among the cultivated and mentally active, hagiography is now a very unpopular form of literature. The fact is not at all surprising. The cultivated and the mentally active have an insatiable appetite for novelty, diversity and distraction. But the saints, however commanding their talents and whatever the nature of their professional activities, are all incessantly preoccupied with only one subject—spiritual Reality and the means by which they and their fellows can come to the unitive knowledge of that Reality. And as for their actions—these are as monotonously uniform as their thoughts; for in all circumstances they behave selflessly, patiently and with indefatigable charity. No wonder, then, if the biographies of such men and women remain unread. For one well educated person who knows anything about William Law there are two or three hundred who have read Boswell’s life of his younger contemporary. Why? Because, until he actually lay dying, Johnson indulged himself in the most fascinating of multiple personalities; whereas Law, for all the superiority of his talents was almost absurdly simple and single-minded. Legion prefers to read about Legion. It is for this reason that, in the whole repertory of epic, drama and the novel there are hardly any representations of true theocentric saints.

The all-consuming selves we take for granted today are “merely empty receptacles of desire.” Infinitely plastic and decentered, the modern citizen of the republic of consumption lives on slippery terrain, journeying to nowhere in particular. So too, nothing could be more corrosive of the kinds of social sympathy and connectedness that constitute the emotional substructure of collective resistance and rebellion. Instead, consumer culture cultivates a politics of style and identity focused on the rights and inner psychic freedom of the individual, one not comfortable with an older ethos of social rather than individual liberation. On the contrary, it tends to infantilize, encouraging insatiable cravings for more and more novel forms of a faux self-expression. The individuality it promises is a kind of perpetual tease, nowadays generating, for example, an ever-expanding galaxy of internet apps leaving in their wake a residue of chronic anticipation. Hibernating inside this “material girl” quest for more stuff and self-improvement is a sacramental quest for transcendence, reveries of what might be, a “transubstantiation of goods, using products and gear to create a magical realm in which all is harmony, happiness, and contentment… in which their best and most admirable self will emerge at last.” The privatization of utopia! Still, what else is there?

Habit is an acquired and cultivated disposition to act in one way as opposed to another. It is the significant form that bursts of energy take as they are channeled through existing patterns of associated living, dependent upon anticipated response as much as novel impulse.

Recognising such dimensions implicit to the reading experience can distract from the immediacy of our response; it can substitute literary archaeology for novelistic reality. That is one pole. But the other extreme is equally limiting. By failing to realise the issues involved in communicating with fictional modes that are different to our own, in effect we do not read in the fullest sense. Between intellectual pedantry and cultivated ignorance I would pose a third approach to reading—that of the informed imagination. After occupying this position true evaluation can begin.

You control your passions by cultivating that humility which recognizes the good in your passions and utilizes it, the bad in your passions and suppresses it, the express will of God for your passions and follows it, the goal of victory over your unruly passions (which is heaven) and wins it.

You can embrace life by opening up yourself to see the task of ironing a shirt not as a tiresome chore but as an exercise in cultivating trained spontaneity; a head cold not as inconvenient but as a chance to cozy up in bed reading novels; a canceled wedding engagement not as heartbreak but as an opportunity for a new future.

Lan Xichen could restrain himself no longer. “Thirty-three lashes from the discipline whip!” he exclaimed. “All in one sitting. One per senior. You must know how painful the lashes are, and how long one must lie in bed to recover! After he stubbornly escorted you back to the Burial Mounds, he returned morosely on his own to receive his punishment. Do you know how long he kneeled before the Wall of Discipline?! When I went to check on him, I told him this: Wei-gongzi has already committed a grave crime. Why must you add to them? Yet he told me…that while he could not say whether your actions were right or wrong, he was willing to carry the burden with you, regardless.

I feel sick when I look at the parody synopsis, at the letters from the film company... The novel is 'about' a colour problem. I said nothing in it that wasn't true. But the emotion it came out of was something frightening, the unhealthy, feverish illicit excitement of wartime, a lying nostalgia, a longing for licence, for freedom, for the jungle, for formlessness. It is so clear to me that I can't read that novel now without feeling ashamed, as if I were in a street naked. Yet no one else seems to see it. Not one of the reviewers saw it. Not one of my cultivated and literary friends saw it. It is an immoral novel because that terrible lying nostalgia lights every sentence.

Poetry is not an esoteric art cultivated by dreamy young men in open collars and with wispy beards. Its finest masters have always been men and women of outstanding energy and great, though by no means common, sense. Poetry is the most economical way of saying certain things that cannot be said in any other way. At its most intense it expresses better than other forms of literature whatever is left of us when we are not involved in instinct-following, surviving, competing, or problem-solving. Its major property is not, as some suppose, beauty. It is power. It is the most powerful form of communication. It does the most work per syllable, operating on a vast field—that of our emotions. It gains its efficiency from the use of certain levers—rhythm, music, rhyme, metaphor, and many more—for which other forms of communication are less well adapted. Some poetry, especially modern poetry, is difficult. But just as our ears have accustomed themselves to difficult music, so our understanding, if we are willing to make an effort, can accustom itself to the most condensed and superficially strange verse. At one time poetry was as democratic an art as the novel is nowadays. It can be so again, if we are willing to make it so.

Teens who are too gregarious to spend time alone often fail to cultivate their talents “because practicing music or studying math requires a solitude they dread.” Madeleine L’Engle, the author of the classic young adult novel A Wrinkle in Time and more than sixty other books, says that she would never have developed into such a bold thinker had she not spent so much of her childhood alone with books and ideas.

Clamor is prohibited in the Cloud Recesses,” Lan Wangji stated. “Then scream for help quietly,” Wei Wuxian said. “Also, when I tear off your clothes, do your very best to keep me at bay. Cover and protect your chest for dear life. Don’t let me tear off anything.” There was momentary silence from under the blanket. “That sounds complicated,” said Lan Wangji, at last. “That’s complicated?!” Wei Wuxian blurted. “Mn,” Lan Wangji affirmed. “Nothing for it, then,” Wei Wuxian said. “Let’s switch. You can rape me instead—

More research has since confirmed and extended these simple findings. In addition to satisfying relationships, other behaviors that predict happiness include:        •    a steady dose of altruistic acts        •    making lists of things for which you are grateful, which generates feelings of happiness in the short term        •    cultivating a general “attitude of gratitude,” which generates feelings of happiness in the long term        •    sharing novel experiences with a loved one        •    deploying a ready “forgiveness reflex” when loved ones slight you If

What Kant took to be the necessary schemata of reality,' says a modern Freudian, 'are really only the necessary schemata of repression.' And an experimental psychologist adds that 'a sense of time can only exist where there is submission to reality.' To see everything as out of mere succession is to behave like a man drugged or insane. Literature and history, as we know them, are not like that; they must submit, be repressed. It is characteristic of the stage we are now at, I think, that the question of how far this submission ought to go--or, to put it the other way, how far one may cultivate fictional patterns or paradigms--is one which is debated, under various forms, by existentialist philosophers, by novelists and anti-novelists, by all who condemn the myths of historiography. It is a debate of fundamental interest, I think, and I shall discuss it in my fifth talk. Certainly, it seems, there must, even when we have achieved a modern degree of clerical scepticism, be some submission to the fictive patterns. For one thing, a systematic submission of this kind is almost another way of describing what we call 'form.' 'An inter-connexion of parts all mutually implied'; a duration (rather than a space) organizing the moment in terms of the end, giving meaning to the interval between tick and tock because we humanly do not want it to be an indeterminate interval between the tick of birth and the tock of death. That is a way of speaking in temporal terms of literary form. One thinks again of the Bible: of a beginning and an end (denied by the physicist Aristotle to the world) but humanly acceptable (and allowed by him to plots). Revelation, which epitomizes the Bible, puts our fate into a book, and calls it the book of life, which is the holy city. Revelation answers the command, 'write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter'--'what is past and passing and to come'--and the command to make these things interdependent. Our novels do likewise. Biology and cultural adaptation require it; the End is a fact of life and a fact of the imagination, working out from the middle, the human crisis. As the theologians say, we 'live from the End,' even if the world should be endless. We need ends and kairoi and the pleroma, even now when the history of the world has so terribly and so untidily expanded its endless successiveness. We re-create the horizons we have abolished, the structures that have collapsed; and we do so in terms of the old patterns, adapting them to our new worlds. Ends, for example, become a matter of images, figures for what does not exist except humanly. Our stories must recognize mere successiveness but not be merely successive; Ulysses, for example, may be said to unite the irreducible chronos of Dublin with the irreducible kairoi of Homer. In the middest, we look for a fullness of time, for beginning, middle, and end in concord. For concord or consonance really is the root of the matter, even in a world which thinks it can only be a fiction. The theologians revive typology, and are followed by the literary critics. We seek to repeat the performance of the New Testament, a book which rewrites and requites another book and achieves harmony with it rather than questioning its truth. One of the seminal remarks of modern literary thought was Eliot's observation that in the timeless order of literature this process is continued. Thus we secularize the principle which recurs from the New Testament through Alexandrian allegory and Renaissance Neo-Platonism to our own time. We achieve our secular concords of past and present and future, modifying the past and allowing for the future without falsifying our own moment of crisis. We need, and provide, fictions of concord.

Then, turning to Pietro, he said, ‘you should leave your wife more time.’ ‘She has all day available.’ ‘I’m not kidding. If you don’t, you’re guilty not only on a human level, but also on a political one.’ ‘What’s the crime?’ ‘The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.’ I waited in silence for Pietro to respond. My husband reacted with sarcasm, ‘Elena can cultivate her intelligence when and how she likes. The essential thing is that she not take time from me.’ ‘If she doesn’t take it from you, then who can she take it from?

Everywhere I saw much vice and little virtue; everywhere I found the vanity, envy, avarice, and intemperance that enslaved the weak to the whims of the strong; everywhere I could divide man into two classes, to be pitied equally. In one, the rich man was a slave to his pleasures; in the other, the poor man a victim of fate—yet I never perceived in one the urge to do better nor in the other the possibility of becoming better, as if both cultivated their common unhappiness and sought only to add shackles to shackles. The wealthiest among them invariably tightened his chains by doubling his desires while the poorest, insulted and mistrusted by the other, received not the slightest encouragement necessary to bear his burden.

It might be useful here to say a word about Beckett, as a link between the two stages, and as illustrating the shift towards schism. He wrote for transition, an apocalyptic magazine (renovation out of decadence, a Joachite indication in the title), and has often shown a flair for apocalyptic variations, the funniest of which is the frustrated millennialism of the Lynch family in Watt, and the most telling, perhaps, the conclusion of Comment c'est. He is the perverse theologian of a world which has suffered a Fall, experienced an Incarnation which changes all relations of past, present, and future, but which will not be redeemed. Time is an endless transition from one condition of misery to another, 'a passion without form or stations,' to be ended by no parousia. It is a world crying out for forms and stations, and for apocalypse; all it gets is vain temporality, mad, multiform antithetical influx. It would be wrong to think that the negatives of Beckett are a denial of the paradigm in favour of reality in all its poverty. In Proust, whom Beckett so admires, the order, the forms of the passion, all derive from the last book; they are positive. In Beckett, the signs of order and form are more or less continuously presented, but always with a sign of cancellation; they are resources not to be believed in, cheques which will bounce. Order, the Christian paradigm, he suggests, is no longer usable except as an irony; that is why the Rooneys collapse in laughter when they read on the Wayside Pulpit that the Lord will uphold all that fall. But of course it is this order, however ironized, this continuously transmitted idea of order, that makes Beckett's point, and provides his books with the structural and linguistic features which enable us to make sense of them. In his progress he has presumed upon our familiarity with his habits of language and structure to make the relation between the occulted forms and the narrative surface more and more tenuous; in Comment c'est he mimes a virtually schismatic breakdown of this relation, and of his language. This is perfectly possible to reach a point along this line where nothing whatever is communicated, but of course Beckett has not reached it by a long way; and whatever preserves intelligibility is what prevents schism. This is, I think, a point to be remembered whenever one considers extremely novel, avant-garde writing. Schism is meaningless without reference to some prior condition; the absolutely New is simply unintelligible, even as novelty. It may, of course, be asked: unintelligible to whom? --the inference being that a minority public, perhaps very small--members of a circle in a square world--do understand the terms in which the new thing speaks. And certainly the minority public is a recognized feature of modern literature, and certainly conditions are such that there may be many small minorities instead of one large one; and certainly this is in itself schismatic. The history of European literature, from the time the imagination's Latin first made an accommodation with the lingua franca, is in part the history of the education of a public--cultivated but not necessarily learned, as Auerbach says, made up of what he calls la cour et la ville. That this public should break up into specialized schools, and their language grow scholastic, would only be surprising if one thought that the existence of excellent mechanical means of communication implied excellent communications, and we know it does not, McLuhan's 'the medium is the message' notwithstanding. But it is still true that novelty of itself implies the existence of what is not novel, a past. The smaller the circle, and the more ambitious its schemes of renovation, the less useful, on the whole, its past will be. And the shorter. I will return to these points in a moment.

His father was in an unexpectedly soft mood on that night, when the moon swam in a cloudless sky over the begrimed shadows of the town. “You still believe in something, then?” he said in a clear voice, which had been growing feeble of late. “You believe in flesh and blood, perhaps? A full and equable contempt would soon do away with that, too. But since you have not attained to it, I advise you to cultivate that form of contempt which is called pity. It is perhaps the least difficult — always remembering that you, too, if you are anything, are as pitiful as the rest, yet never expecting any pity for yourself.” “What is one to do, then?” sighed the young man, regarding his father, rigid in the high-backed chair. “Look on — make no sound,” were the last words of the man who had spent his life in blowing blasts upon a terrible trumpet which filled heaven and earth with ruins, while mankind went on its way unheeding.

Novels are excluded from “serious reading,” so that the man who, bent on self-improvement, has been deciding to devote ninety minutes three times a week to a complete study of the works of Charles Dickens will be well advised to alter his plans. The reason is not that novels are not serious-some of the great literature of the world is in the form of prose fiction-the reason is that bad novels out not to be read, and that good novels never demand any appreciable mental application on the part of the reader. A good novel rushes you forward like a skiff down a stream, and you arrive at the end, perhaps breathless, but unexhausted. The best novels involve the least strain. Now in the cultivation of the mind one of the most important factors is precisely the feeling of strain, of difficulty, of a task which one part of you is anxious to achieve and another part of you is anxious to shirk; and that feeling cannot be got in facing a novel.

Novels are excluded from 'serious reading,' so that the man who, bent on self-improvement, has been deciding to devote ninety minutes three times a week to a complete study of the works of Charles Dickens will be well advised to alter his plans. The reason is not that novels are not serious-some of the great literature of the world is in the form of prose fiction-the reason is that bad novels ought not to be read, and that good novels never demand any appreciable mental application on the part of the reader. A good novel rushes you forward like a skiff down a stream, and you arrive at the end, perhaps breathless, but unexhausted. The best novels involve the least strain. Now in the cultivation of the mind one of the most important factors is precisely the feeling of strain, of difficulty, of a task which one part of you is anxious to achieve and another part of you is anxious to shirk; and that feeling cannot be got in facing a novel.

Novels are excluded from 'serious reading,' so that the man who, bent on self-improvement, has been deciding to devote ninety minutes three times a week to a complete study of the works of Charles Dickens will be well advised to alter his plans. The reason is not that novels are not serious-some of the great literature of the world is in the form of prose fiction-the reason is that bad novels ought not to be read, and that good novels never demand any appreciable mental application on the part of the reader. A good novel rushes you forward like a skiff down a stream, and you arrive at the end, perhaps breathless, but unexhausted. The best novels involve the least strain. Now in the cultivation of the mind one of the most important factors is precisely the feeling of strain, of difficulty, of a task which one part of you is anxious to achieve and another part of you is anxious to shirk; and that feeling cannot be got in facing a novel. ― Arnold Bennett

In class, we identified some elements essential to creativity: risk, perseverance, novel problem solving, disciplined spontaneity, the need to make exterior one’s inner universe, openness to experience, luck, genetics, a willingness to react against the status quo, delight, mastery, the ability to live not only one’s own life but also the life of one’s time, childlike innocence guided by the sophistication of an adult, resourcefulness, a sense of spirituality a mind of large general knowledge fascinated by particulars, passion, the useful application of obsession, a sacred place (abstract or physical), among many others. That all these qualities, and more, might combine to produce what we refer to as a moment of inspiration is one of the great mysteries and triumphs of mind. Our minds grow. Not because we always need them to but because it is their nature, just as it is the nature of flies to seek out open wounds and the nature of flowers to follow the sun.

Darwin and Nietzsche were the common spiritual and intellectual source for the mean-spirited and bellicose ideological assault on progress, liberalism, and democracy that fired the late-nineteenth-century campaign to preserve or rejuvenate the traditional order. Presensitized for this retreat from modernity, prominent fin-de-siècle aesthetes, engages literati, polemical publicists, academic sociologists, and last but not least, conservative and reactionary politicians became both consumers and disseminators of the untried action-ideas. Oscar Wilde and Stefan George were perhaps most representative of the aristocratizing aesthetes whose rush into dandyism or retreat into cultural monasticism was part of the outburst against bourgeois philistinism and social levelling. Their yearning for a return to an aristocratic past and their aversion to the invasive democracy of their day were shared by Thomas Mann and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, whose nostalgia for the presumably superior sensibilities of a bygone cultivated society was part of their claim to privileged social space and position in the present. Although they were all of burgher or bourgeois descent, they extolled ultra-patrician values and poses, thereby reflecting and advancing the rediscovery and reaffirmation of the merits and necessities of elitism. Theirs was not simply an aesthetic and unpolitical posture precisely because they knowingly contributed to the exaltation of societal hierarchy at a time when this exaltation was being used to do battle against both liberty and equality. At any rate, they may be said to have condoned this partisan attack by not explicitly distancing themselves from it. Maurice Barrès, Paul Bourget, and Gabriele D'Annunzio were not nearly so self-effacing. They were not only conspicuous and active militants of antidemocratic elitism, but they meant their literary works to convert the reader to their strident persuasion. Their polemical statements and their novels promoted the cult of the superior self and nation, in which the Church performed the holy sacraments. Barrès, Bourget, and D'Annunzio were purposeful practitioners of the irruptive politics of nostalgia that called for the restoration of enlightened absolutism, hierarchical society. and elite culture in the energizing fires of war.

(a) A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars, arguing with other dishevelled, bespectacled writers. He says very ‘deep’ things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he has just published. (b) A writer has a duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation; convinced, as he is, that he has been born into an age of mediocrity, he believes that being understood would mean losing his chance of ever being considered a genius. A writer revises and rewrites each sentence many times. The vocabulary of the average man is made up of 3,000 words; a real writer never uses any of these, because there are another 189,000 in the dictionary, and he is not the average man. (c) Only other writers can understand what a writer is trying to say. Even so, he secretly hates all other writers, because they are always jockeying for the same vacancies left by the history of literature over the centuries. And so the writer and his peers compete for the prize of ‘most complicated book’: the one who wins will be the one who has succeeded in being the most difficult to read. (d) A writer understands about things with alarming names, like semiotics, epistemology, neoconcretism. When he wants to shock someone, he says things like: ‘Einstein is a fool’, or ‘Tolstoy was the clown of the bourgeoisie.’ Everyone is scandalized, but they nevertheless go and tell other people that the theory of relativity is bunk, and that Tolstoy was a defender of the Russian aristocracy. (e) When trying to seduce a woman, a writer says: ‘I’m a writer’, and scribbles a poem on a napkin. It always works. (f) Given his vast culture, a writer can always get work as a literary critic. In that role, he can show his generosity by writing about his friends’ books. Half of any such reviews are made up of quotations from foreign authors and the other half of analyses of sentences, always using expressions such as ‘the epistemological cut’, or ‘an integrated bi-dimensional vision of life’. Anyone reading the review will say: ‘What a cultivated person’, but he won’t buy the book because he’ll be afraid he might not know how to continue reading when the epistemological cut appears. (g) When invited to say what he is reading at the moment, a writer always mentions a book no one has ever heard of. (h) There is only one book that arouses the unanimous admiration of the writer and his peers: Ulysses by James Joyce. No writer will ever speak ill of this book, but when someone asks him what it’s about, he can’t quite explain, making one doubt that he has actually read it.

No one would choose this sort of painful adolescence, but the fact is that the solitude of Woz’s teens, and the single-minded focus on what would turn out to be a lifelong passion, is typical for highly creative people. According to the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who between 1990 and 1995 studied the lives of ninety-one exceptionally creative people in the arts, sciences, business, and government, many of his subjects were on the social margins during adolescence, partly because “intense curiosity or focused interest seems odd to their peers.” Teens who are too gregarious to spend time alone often fail to cultivate their talents “because practicing music or studying math requires a solitude they dread.” Madeleine L’Engle, the author of the classic young adult novel A Wrinkle in Time and more than sixty other books, says that she would never have developed into such a bold thinker had she not spent so much of her childhood alone with books and ideas. As a young boy, Charles Darwin made friends easily but preferred to spend his time taking long, solitary nature walks. (As an adult he was no different. “My dear Mr. Babbage,” he wrote to the famous mathematician who had invited him to a dinner party, “I am very much obliged to you for sending me cards for your parties, but I am afraid of accepting them, for I should meet some people there, to whom I have sworn by all the saints in Heaven, I never go out.”)

She refused to feel guilty for not talking to Portia about the Earl of Harte. She couldn't discuss what she didn't understand, and she had no idea what to think of the man with the forbidding gaze. Avenell Slade. Lily snuggled deeper beneath her blankets. She loved the way his name felt moving through her mind. It was sharp and smooth at the same time. Dark and light. Lily knew she was no great beauty. She did not have Portia's dramatic dark hair or flashing eyes. Nor did she have Emma's commanding presence. She did her best to be content with her place among her exceptional sisters. But now, after experiencing Lord Harte's painful slight, she found herself wishing she stood out more, that she was somehow more attractive, more striking. She should forget him. Put him completely from her mind. He had made it infinitely clear he did not welcome her interest. Yet, she wanted to know him. It was that simple and that impossible. A hollowness spread from Lily's center. It was a sensation she had experienced more than once since she had begun her foray into the marriage market. It was the fear that what she sought might never be found- that the kind of deep passion she yearned for existed only in sordid novels. As thoughts of Lord Harte continued to agitate her mind and created a growing restlessness in her body, Lily imagined an often-read scene from one of her favorite stories. It was frighteningly easy to cast the enigmatic Lord Harte in the role of dark seducer, but she struggled to envision herself as the intrepid heroine. Lily did not possess a bold bone in her body. By nature, she had always been rather shy and had never been able to cultivate the kind of self-confidence her sisters possessed. Though she may crave the passionate experiences she read about, she did not possess the courage to explore such things beyond the privacy of her mind.

below. In an unclouded harmony of tastes and interests they cultivated ferns in Wardian cases, made macrame lace and wool embroidery on linen, collected American revolutionary glazed ware, subscribed to "Good Words," and read Ouida's novels for the sake of the Italian atmosphere.

Voltaire—you know him? He said that a man should cultivate his own garden. Guess I’m with him on that.

You see, the Regency conduct book tended to judge a woman by how she conducts herself-that is, by how she acts, by how she seems. The novel, by contrast, was concerned with what women are really like, admitting- perhaps for the very first time- that women too have a fulsome interior life, with thoughts and feelings that are as crucial to get right as the actions that follow from them. In the novel it was much more important that a woman cultivate herself than that she learn how to appear to do so, much more crucial that she be truly worthy than that she learn how to maker herself seem so. In the novel, in other words, women are allowed to be real, and nor merely the cardboard cut-outs to whom the conduct books directed its advice.

Happiness and Peace is something we nurture from within, Cultivate yours and enjoy the sunshine, feel the warmth.

Dorian? Is that an important publisher?" "Count Dorian is really famous. How do you not know him?" "I can only think of the Dorian in the painting. You know, Oscar Wilde’s beautiful, cursed one?" he says. "Sorry. And, anyway, why is he important?" he asks, noting her apprehension. "Well, for one thing, he’s a Count." "Pardon..." he mocks, in a French accent. "Why is this Count famous?" "Because he cultivates young talent. He’s launched a lot of young people in different fields: music, painting, sculpture, fashion, theater, movies." She pauses for breath. "And writers, too." "So he’s a type of patron." She nods. "And he’s contacted you about your novels?" She nods again. "And what’s the problem?" "He has an estate in Tuscany, as well as houses in New York and Hong Kong. And he’s asked to meet me." "Are you embarrassed to go on your own? I can take you if you want. But if he’s a talent hunter, you just need to act as natural as possible and you'll be fine. I imagine he’s used to it. He can’t not like you," he says, caressing her face. "He thinks I’m a man..," she whispers. Andrea freezes. "Eh?!" he exclaims, looking at her and suddenly feeling a strange foreboding. "I

The gospel call invites us to apprentice ourselves to Jesus, become pilgrims along the compassionate way, and journey deeper together into the heart and life of God. In our contemporary setting, however, Christians often look more like bustling tourists than faithful pilgrims patiently engaged upon an eternal pilgrimage into Divine Love. Countless people today make periodic excursions into the spiritual supermarket in pursuit of a novel offer, but few seem willing to sign up as pilgrims in the lifelong adventure of discipleship.

Oh! the deep subtlety and cunning craftiness of the enemy! calling, in the name of our God, for enlargement of our confidence in him, that we might the more blindly follow on in the course of his deceivableness. And, Oh! the hollowness of our own hearts, which drank in flattery and seduction, and persuaded us we were drinking in the sincere milk of the word, and growing in love and in meekness. And, Oh! the awful justice, and yet redeeming grace, of our God, who, because of our secret pride, which led to a craving after something more than the gentle dew of the Spirit, morning by morning, gave us, indeed, meat to our lust, by leaving us under a spiritual power, which was supernatural and sweet to the taste, but afterwards wormwood and ashes; and yet remembering his mercy, repented him of his anger, and snatched us as brands from the burning. Surely we have so much of glorious revelation made plain to us, that we can feed upon it in peace and patience, with thanksgiving; and need not to cultivate an unhealthy appetite after crude and novel views, in which we can neither find rest nor edification.

At school (father) had excelled in music, mathematics, rituals and writing, cultivating his mind as finely as wind sculpts pebbles smooth and round.

Though his impudence and inconstancy strained his relations with family and colleagues, Dostoevsky appears almost to have cultivated these stresses as major sources of his fiction, most directly of the novel Poor Folk, the first draft of which he completed about a year after resigning his commission. The novel, like almost all of Dostoevsky’s writing, is a study of the forces that constrain human freedom, both exterior forces such as money and power, and interior ones like illness and sexual desire. Moreover Dostoevsky immediately set about questioning the very distinction between the two realms, showing how subjective experience becomes objectified in material objects of desire and fear, and vice versa. However, like most of Dostoevsky’s fiction, Poor Folk also revealed his belief in the power of fiction to redeem the world by manifesting an imaginative realm in which freedom is – or, at least, can be – sovereign.

For a few weeks you got up at six to compose short stories at the kitchen table with while Amanda slept in the other room. Then your night life started getting more interesting and complicated, and climbing out of bed became harder and harder. You were gathering experience for a novel. You went to parties with writers, cultivated a writerly persona. You wanted to be Dylan Thomas without the paunch. F. Scott Fitzgerald without the crack-up. You wanted to skip over the dull grind of actual creation.

Eventually I understood that a man in possession of Bildung was more than merely cultivated: he was ideally purified by humanism, an aristocrat of sensibility and wisdom.

The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s first novel, wasn’t published until she was thirty-nine. And after a ten-year stint in college and time spent working as a ski instructor, Dietrich Mateschitz was forty before he created blockbuster energy drink company Red Bull. Pay attention, cultivate self-awareness, feed your strengths, and you will find your way. And once you discover your dharma, pursue it.

I have always been passionate about storytelling, and my fascination with mysteries started at a very young age. As a teenager I attempted my first novels, but it wasn't until adulthood, and parenthood in particular, that I rediscovered and cultivated my love of writing. There's nothing quite like tiny humans to inspire an encyclopaedia of anecdotes, and a long winter (followed by a global lockdown) to prompt the search for a new hobby and career. What could be more fun than imagining violent deaths, killing off interesting characters, and getting paid for it?

The same is true of oil – and, in a more alarming way, of the actual fruits of agriculture. If we make ourselves greedy and grasping tyrants of the earth – ravishing and not serving it – it takes its revenge in waste lands, barren soil, flood, drought and dearth. Every time we upset the balance of natural forces by over-cultivation, either of earth, animals or what-not, we seem to come up against some law which sends back to us in famine or disease the catastrophes we tried to avoid.

It bloomed in the bleak soil where her darkest dreams were born. Dire petals. Bloody thorns. An emotion perfectly cultivated. Sculpted with the violence she adored.

If you walk the night road too often, sooner or later, you'll run into ghosts.

How did you come to live in Amsterdam?” I ask her. “Did you study there?” She twists a strand of hair around her fingers, staring out over the rail and across the water. “No, I studied medicine in Algiers, then earned my doctoral degree in Italy. Then spent several years as a ship’s surgeon because I couldn’t find professional work on the continent.” She squints, counting the years backward in her head. “Then I was hired to assist at the Hortus Medicus—the botanical garden in Amsterdam that cultivates medicinal plants from around the world. They’re funded by the university, and most of the physicians do at least some of their training there. I started teaching as a substitute when the male professors were traveling or unwell, and eventually they gave me my own classes and let me do my own research.” “Do you speak Dutch?” I ask. She nods. “And Italian. And Arabic, and some of the Berber dialects, though not fluently.” “And you’re a doctor,” I say, trying to make it a statement rather than a question though the concept still seems outlandish, not because women don’t have the capacity for medical professions, but because I’ve simply never heard of any reaching such a recognized level of achievement. “A real doctor.” She gives me a half smile. “Improbable as it may seem, I am.” “Felicity Primrose Montague!” I exclaim. Monty throws back his head and laughs. Felicity rolls her eyes. “Oh good, now there are two of you.” “You’re incredible,” I say to her. She looks down at her hands, color rising in her cheeks. “That’s very kind, thank you.” “You are!” I say. “You’re a doctor! And a professor! At a university!” “It really is bloody impressive, Fel,” Monty adds. “And a pirate!” I say. “You’re like an adventure-novel heroine! I wish I could introduce you to my fiancée. She’d go mad over you.” “Is she interested in medicine or piracy?” Felicity asks. “Neither in particular,” I say. “But she’s very interested in women who cast off societal expectations and work for change despite the men who endeavor to stand in their way.

I always greet others with a smile, even though I might not receive one in kind - Jin Guangyao

Conrad spent six months working for a cargo company in the EIC in 1890, three weeks of it aboard a steamship traveling up river to today’s Kisangani. There is no mention of rubber in the novel because Conrad was there five years before rubber cultivation began. Kurtz is an ivory trader. So whatever sources Conrad was using when he began work on Heart of Darkness in 1898, his personal experiences would at most have added some color and context. Hochschild will have none of it, insisting that Conrad “saw the beginnings of the frenzy of plunder and death” which he then “recorded” in Heart of Darkness. The brutalities by whites in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now were inspired by the novel, Hochschild avers, because Conrad “had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.” In another example of creative chronology, Hochschild cites a quotation that he believes was the inspiration for Kurtz’s famous scrawl, “Exterminate all the brutes!” The quotation was made public for the first time during a Belgian legislative debate in 1906. Whatever its authenticity, it could not be a source for a book published in 1902.

Have you and my son dual cultivated?

Bread – like real love – took time, cultivation, strong loving hands and patience. It lived, rising and growing to fruition only under the most perfect circumstances. If the water was too warm, it killed the yeast; too cool and the yeast was not inspired to grow the bread. Without enough sugar, the yeast would starve, leaving the bread flat and lifeless; if the air was not humid enough, the yeast could not spur the bread to reach its full potential.

Yin Yu and the farmers were nervously spectating the action and providing commentary. “Yeah, I can tell that lady ghost's love has warped into hatred. She's going nuts!” “I don't think so. I'm sure she won't be able to bring herself to go through with it. Want some melon seeds?” “Give me another handful, thanks.” “How can everyone be in the mood to snack on melon seeds?” Xie Lian asked, frowning. “Your Highness, didn't you eat a bunch too?” the people said. “Huh?” Only then did Xie Lian realize that while he was focused on the show, he had unconsciously accepted a handful of melon seeds that had been passed to him and eaten them all. He slapped his forehead.

To become an innovator, one must possess the ability to envision novel innovations across a range of domains, from material discoveries to proprietary-novelty. Acquiring diverse skills and cultivating a mindset that embraces cross-disciplinary thinking and exploration paves the way for the generation of groundbreaking ideas. The breadth of knowledge and expertise allows innovators to traverse different realms, connect seemingly unrelated concepts, and ultimately push the boundaries of what is possible.

I’m given a tour of a Zen temple in the middle of town. It surprises me to see the walls, ceiling and floor looking so spotless, because the temple otherwise seems very old, and I find out I’m right, the temple is old, but the building is relatively new. It’s demolished and rebuilt every fifty years. This is done to preserve the construction technique, because the craft is more important than the object it created, the temple. Maybe it’s also to avoid cultivating attachment to a material thing. Or to avoid cultivating the self, and obliterating the illusion of value?

I don’t mean you individually; but Churchmen do. They treat us as if we were some strange kind of creatures, from the heart of Africa perhaps. They don’t think we are just like themselves: as well educated; meaning as well; with as much right to our own ideas.” Mr. May could scarcely restrain a laugh. “Just like themselves.” The idea of a Dissenter setting up to be as well educated, and as capable of forming an opinion, as a cultivated Anglican, an Oxford man, and a beneficed clergyman, was too novel and too foolish not to be somewhat startling as well. Mr. May was aware that human nature is strangely blind to its own deficiencies, but was it possible that any delusion could go so far as this? He did laugh a little — just the ghost of a laugh — at the idea. But what is the use of making any serious opposition to such a statement? The very fact of contesting the assumption seemed to give it a certain weight. “Whenever this is done,” said Phœbe, with serene philosophy, “I think you may expect a revulsion of feeling. The class to which papa belongs is very friendly to the Established Church, and wishes to do her every honour.” “Is it indeed? We ought to be much gratified,” said Mr. May. Phœbe gave him a quick glance, but he composed his face and met her look meekly. It actually diverted him from his pre-occupation, and that is a great deal to say. “We would willingly do her any honour; we would willingly be friends, even look up to her, if that would please her,” added Phœbe, very gravely, conscious of the importance of what she was saying; “but when we see clergymen, and common persons also, who have never had one rational thought on the subject, always setting us down as ignorant and uncultured, because we are Dissenters — —” “But no one does that,” said Ursula, soothingly,

There are monochronic people and polychronic people. The monochronic succeed only if they work on one endeavor at a time. They cannot read while listening to music; they cannot interrupt a novel to begin another without losing the thread; at their worst, they are unable to have a conversation while they shave or put on their makeup. The polychronic are the exact opposite. They succeed only if they cultivate many interests simultaneously; if they dedicate themselves to only one venture, they fall prey to boredom. The monochronic are more methodical but often have little imagination. The polychronic seem more creative, but they are often messy and fickle. In the end, if you explore the biographies of great thinkers and writers, you will find that there were both polychronic and monochronic among them.

I had sequenced Pickwick at home using nothing more complex than average kitchen utensils and cultivated her in a denucleated goose egg.

- Capture, Organize, Distill, Express - Change perception before behavior. Requires self-trust and awareness that your current sense of control could be inferior. - Novel content is overrated. Craft and cultivate existing knowledge as opposed to starting over from zero. Content Assemble.

The Test of Death -Would you believe someone you trust and swear to tell you the truth? -No -Why? -He may say what he thinks is the truth, which is not so, and I believe that the truth is not given, but taken, snatched, you have to fight to get it, the truth is not free. – We sent you to carry out a dangerous, sensitive task, a matter of life or death, and we sent someone you know is a deceiver and a liar to share it with you, we do not trust him either, but we need him? Do you accept it with him? -Maybe yes and maybe no -How? -Trust here has no place, even if I trust him, I may not implement it with him, and I may implement it with someone I do not trust, everyone in a certain circumstance has the ability of betrayal and treachery, as they have the capacity for honesty and sincerity, I will not trust anyone with a dangerous operation like this, but I will trust the plan; if the plan had taken all possibilities into consideration, including the possibilities of treachery, and if we put alternative plans in case of emergency, I would trust the plan itself, and implement it with those whose presence is required. -What is brainwashing? -It is a radical transformation of ideas in a short period of time, without a convincing reason or explanation. – How does the process work? -The primitive method is by coercive means, such as physical or psychological torture, to implant thoughts directly into the victim’s head. -What is the most advanced method? -By manipulating the surrounding environment of the victim, and passing ideas into his brain indirectly, to convince him that it is the product of chance, or for supernatural reasons such as your pre-written destiny, or that God has chosen you for this moment, and the more convincing the environment, and the more serendipitous, the quality of the process better. -How do you know you are being brainwashed? -I watch my thoughts, if I suddenly decide to switch them without a clear and convincing reason, and within a short period of time, then I have to study the changes in the environment around me, new people, targeted ads on social media, random videos, and everything around me seem to happen by chance It is directly or indirectly related to new ideas. Then research and focus, analyze and elicit, to try and discover the process. -What is long-term brainwashing? -A traditional brainwashing process, but it takes a relatively long time, such as repeating the idea to be cultivated weekly instead of repeating it daily, and this happens if the victim is intelligent and careful observation, so the process is done carefully and slowly so as not to discover it. -Which is more powerful, short-term or long-term brainwashing? -The short; the mind quickly ignores, when passing the idea in separate periods of time, it ignores the old ones, and buries them away in its memory, thus their impact decreases, so we are forced to plant the idea a thousand times instead of a hundred, to increase the momentum and compensate for the lack of influence of the old ideas, and with the presence of spaced periods of time when the process takes a long time, and the chance of discovering the target becomes greater. -What is a mind injection, and how is it done? -It is the process of implanting the ideas that are required to be implanted in it, in direct or indirect ways, and each has its own method and method of injection, some of them rush and some of them take longer than the necessary time, and in both cases, the injection does not take its desired effect, but it is possible that the effect is completely reversed. -How do you know that the injection process is going well? -The new and reprehensible reactions of the victim, especially the spontaneous ones. Which is issued near the end of the injection process.

Researchers believe that the conscious cultivation of empathy, including through the reading of novels (see S. Keen), will make communication far easier and will save us from future world cataclysms. —The Journal of Community and Cortex

Who cares about the bright sunlight path? ill walk across a single plank bridge until dark." - Wei Wuxian

My imagination has always been rich, a thing cultivated further by a childhood mired in illness, with many months spent reading Gothic novels filled with foreboding moors, mysterious suitors, and unexplained sounds in the dead of night.

to cultivate compassion and wisdom by considering other people's motivations, and provides us practice in controlling attention, emotion, and outcome. We heal when we transmute the chaos of life into the structure of a novel, when we learn to walk through the world as observers and students rather than wounded, when we make choices about what parts of a story are important and what we can let go of.

The trick is to figure out ways to explore the edges of possibility that surround you. This can be as simple as changing the physical environment you work in, or cultivating a specific kind of social network, or maintaining certain habits in the way you seek out and store information. Recall the question we began with: What kind of environment creates good ideas? The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts.

After nearly collapsing under the pressures of poverty, loneliness, and an addiction to Dexedrine, Spark sought help for her drug use and began to work seriously on a first novel, The Comforters (1957), partly with the financial and emotional support of the novelist Graham Greene. Though a late fiction writer, Spark began producing novels and stories at a rapid pace. In 1961 she wrote The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, widely considered her masterpiece. The novel follows a teacher at a girls’ school who carefully and manipulatively cultivates the minds and morals of a select handful of promising pupils. In 1969, it was adapted into an Academy Award–winning film starring Maggie Smith and was a Royal Command Performance.