Famous Values Quotes

Be famous. Be a big social experiment in getting what you don't want. Find value in what we've been taught is worthless. Find good in what the world says is evil. I'm giving you my life because I want the whole world to know you. I wish the whole world would embrace what it hates. Find what you're afraid of most and go live there.

We proceeded to make way across the mighty Hooghly River, a monstrous offshoot of the Ganges, where we contemplated for a moment, our thoughts seemingly caught in the roaring southward current; there we gazed, toward where the city transitions into mangrove jungle, and somewhere a bit further to the southwest where all the rivers split infinitely like capillaries, where those famous Bengal tigers trod among the sunderbans. Peering in that direction, Bajju gripped the vertical bars just above the horizontal pedestrian railing, breathing slowly and silently, knees locked, still, despite being on arguably the busiest and loudest bridge in the world.

Your value does not decrease based on someone's inability to see your worth.

For most people, art is only valuable if other people say it is; and artists are only worthwhile if they are either rich and famous, or dead.

A society needs famous people; the question is whom it chooses for that role. Any criticism of its choice is by implication a criticism of that society.

It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must in a mass media society where art's principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion. We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his work accumulates 'value' and becomes, ipso-facto, harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power.

Socrates famously said that the unconsidered life is not worth living. He meant that a life lived without forethought or principle is a life so vulnerable to chance, and so dependent on the choices and actions of others, that it is of little real value to the person living it. He further meant that a life well lived is one which has goals, and integrity, which is chosen and directed by the one who lives it, to the fullest extent possible to a human agent caught in the webs of society and history.

It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that.

If you want to make a difference in someone's life, you don't need to be gorgeous, rich, famous, brilliant or perfect. you just have to care.

Then he is a monster!" the Prince crowed, "and I must slay him at once. The Formula works!" "Your Formula must result in a great deal of fighting," I mused. "Oh, yes, when applied correctly mighty and noble battles result! Of course I always win—the value of Prince X is a constant. It cannot be lesser than that of Monster Y—this is the Moral Superiority Hypothesis made famous five hundred years ago by my ancestor Ethelred, the Mathematician-King. We have never seen his equal, in all these centuries.

Over the course of my years, I have met thousands of people. I have dined with the prosperous as well as the poverty-stricken. I have conversed with the mighty and with the meek. I have walked with the famous and the feeble. I have run with outstanding athletes and those who are not athletically inclined. One thing I can tell you with certainty is this: You cannot predict happiness by the amount of money, fame, or power a person has. External conditions do not necessarily make a person happy… The fact is that the external things so valued by the world are often the cause of a great deal of misery in the world. Those who live in thanksgiving daily, however, are usually among the world’s happiest people. And they make others happy as well.

We fail you every single time a (famous) man treats a woman badly, without legal, professional, or personal consequence. Over and over again we tell you it is acceptable for men—famous, infamous, or not at all famous—to abuse women. We look the other way. We make excuses. We reward these men for their bad behavior. We tell you that, as a young woman, you have little value or place in this society.

Truth is not as pompous and romantic as myth ... but it has the immeasurable value of being the Truth.

Eating is an agricultural act," Wendell Berry famously wrote, by which he meant that we are not just passive consumers of food but cocreators of the systems that feed us. Depending on how we spend them, our food dollars can either go to support a food industry devoted to quantity and convenience and "value" or they can nourish a food chain organized around values--values like quality and health. Yes, shopping this way takes more money and effort, but as soon as you begin to treat that expenditure not just as shopping but also as a kind of vote--a vote for health in the largest sense--food no longer seems like the smartest place to economize.

When I was a young philosopher, I asked a senior colleague, Pat Suppes (then and now a famous philosopher of science and an astute student of human nature), what the secret of happiness was. Instead of giving me advice, he made a rather droll observation about what a lot of people who were happy with themselves seem to have done, namely: 1. Take a careful inventory of their shortcomings and flaws 2. Adopt a code of values that treats these things as virtues 3. Admire themselves for living up to it Brutal people admire themselves for being manly; compulsive pedants admire themselves for their attention to detail; naturally selfish and mean people admire themselves for their dedication to helping the market reward talent and punish failure, and so on.

many of the most famous people in our culture have achieved their dreams but have still not found a way to enjoy them. They often turn to drugs because they feel unfulfilled. This is because they are missing the distinction between achieving one’s goals and living one’s values,

Throughout your career, you will compete against people who are more established, more famous, more connected, more specialized. But they can’t be you. They can’t capture your highest distinct value. Only you have you.

The greatest thinkers in history certainly knew the value of shifting the mind into low gear. Charles Darwin described himself as a slow thinker. Einstein was famous for spending ages staring into space in his office at Princeton University.

Human moments are brief, value them when they happen.

It is easy to live with someone of value than someone famous.

Always try to be someone of value than someone famous.

You need to find a way to live your life, that it doesn't make a mockery of your values.

There was a time when educators became famous for providing reasons for learning; now they become famous for inventing a method.

It was Freud's ambition to discover the cause of hysteria, the archetypal female neurosis of his time. In his early investigations, he gained the trust and confidence of many women, who revealed their troubles to him.Time after time, Freud's patients, women from prosperous, conventional families, unburdened painful memories of childhood sexual encounters with men they had trusted: family friends, relatives, and fathers. Freud initially believed his patients and recognized the significance of their confessions. In 1896, with the publication of two works, The Aetiology of Hysteria and Studies on Hysteria, he announced that he had solved the mystery of the female neurosis. At the origin of every case of hysteria, Freud asserted, was a childhood sexual trauma. But Freud was never comfortable with this discovery, because of what it implied about the behavior of respectable family men. If his patients' reports were true, incest was not a rare abuse, confined to the poor and the mentally defective, but was endemic to the patriarchal family. Recognizing the implicit challenge to patriarchal values, Freud refused to identify fathers publicly as sexual aggressors. Though in his private correspondence he cited "seduction by the father" as the "essential point" in hysteria, he was never able to bring himself to make this statement in public. Scrupulously honest and courageous in other respects, Freud falsified his incest cases. In The Aetiology of Hysteria, Freud implausibly identified governessss, nurses, maids, and children of both sexes as the offenders. In Studies in Hysteria, he managed to name an uncle as the seducer in two cases. Many years later, Freud acknowledged that the "uncles" who had molested Rosaslia and Katharina were in fact their fathers. Though he had shown little reluctance to shock prudish sensibilities in other matters, Freud claimed that "discretion" had led him to suppress this essential information. Even though Freud had gone to such lengths to avoid publicly inculpating fathers, he remained so distressed by his seduction theory that within a year he repudiated it entirely. He concluded that his patients' numerous reports of sexual abuse were untrue. This conclusion was based not on any new evidence from patients, but rather on Freud's own growing unwillingness to believe that licentious behavior on the part of fathers could be so widespread. His correspondence of the period revealed that he was particularly troubled by awareness of his own incestuous wishes toward his daughter, and by suspicions of his father, who had died recently. p9-10

It is unlikely that many of us will be famous, or even remembered. But not less important than the brilliant few that lead a nation or a literature to fresh achievements, are the unknown many whose patient efforts keep the world from running backward; who guard and maintain the ancient values, even if they do not conquer new; whose inconspicuous triumph it is to pass on what they inherited from their fathers, unimpaired and undiminished, to their sons. Enough, for almost all of us, if we can hand on the torch, and not let it down; content to win the affection, if it may be, of a few who know us and to be forgotten when they in their turn have vanished. The destiny of mankind is not governed wholly by its 'stars'.

1. The Will to Truth, which is to tempt us to many a hazardous enterprise, the famous Truthfulness of which all philosophers have hitherto spoken with respect, what questions has this Will to Truth not laid before us! What strange, perplexing, questionable questions! It is already a long story; yet it seems as if it were hardly commenced. Is it any wonder if we at last grow distrustful, lose patience, and turn impatiently away? That this Sphinx teaches us at last to ask questions ourselves? WHO is it really that puts questions to us here? WHAT really is this "Will to Truth" in us? In fact we made a long halt at the question as to the origin of this Will—until at last we came to an absolute standstill before a yet more fundamental question. We inquired about the VALUE of this Will. Granted that we want the truth: WHY NOT RATHER untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The problem of the value of truth presented itself before us—or was it we who presented ourselves before the problem? Which of us is the Oedipus here? Which the Sphinx? It would seem to be a rendezvous of questions and notes of interrogation. And could it be believed that it at last seems to us as if the problem had never been propounded before, as if we were the first to discern it, get a sight of it, and RISK RAISING it? For there is risk in raising it, perhaps there is no greater risk.

But some numbers, called dimensionless numbers, have the same numerical value no matter what units of measurement are chosen. Probably the most famous of these is the "fine-structure constant," .... Physicists love this number not just because it is dimensionless, but also because it is a combination of three fundamental constants of nature.

Somewhere along the way, Naomi’s family lost their priorities. All Naomi’s posturings, all her imagined self-importance, all her delusions of having a privileged position in the universe, were eventually challenged by a God who famously scrubs arrogance from His children. There is great value in putting our broken selves back together. Michael Ben Zehabe, Ruth: a woman’s guide to husband material, pg 7

A famous cigarette billboard pictures a curly-headed, bronze-faced, muscular macho with a cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth. The sign reads 'Where a man belongs.' That is a lie. Where a man belongs is at the bedside of his children, leading in devotion and prayer. Where a man belongs is leading his family to the house of God. Where a man belongs is up early and alone with God seeking vision and direction for the family.

I am no ecological Pollyana. I have borne, and will continue to bear, feelings of wholehearted melancholy over the ecological state of the earth. How could I not? How could anyone not? But I am unwilling to become a hand-wringing nihilist, as some environmental 'realists' seem to believe is the more mature posture. Instead, I choose to dwell, as Emily Dickinson famously suggested, in possibility, where we cannot predict what will happen but we make space for it, whatever it is, and realize that our participation has value. This is grown-up optimism, where our bondedness with the rest of creation, a sense of profound interaction, and a belief in our shared ingenuity give meaning to our lives and actions on behalf of the more-than-human world.

In an age that valued prolonged and detailed exposition, complexity, and repetition it was astonishing that Luther should have instinctively discerned the value of brevity.

Make your name and know your value

You have a responsibility to keep your homes, surroundings and city clean.

After all, we are all immigrants to the future; none of us is a native in that land. Margaret Mead famously wrote about the profound changes wrought by the Second World War, “All of us who grew up before the war are immigrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world, living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before.” Today we are again in the early stages of defining a new age. The very underpinnings of our society and institutions--from how we work to how we create value, govern, trade, learn, and innovate--are being profoundly reshaped by amplified individuals. We are indeed all migrating to a new land and should be looking at the new landscape emerging before us like immigrants: ready to learn a new language, a new way of doing things, anticipating new beginnings with a sense of excitement, if also with a bit of understandable trepidation.

When Jesus describes Judgment, the famous separation of the sheep from the goats, he does not mention religious affiliation or sexual orientation or family values. He says, "I was hungry, and ye fed me not" (Matthew 25:42).

It was not Mrs Thatcher who made it possible for groups like Wham! to become rich and famous. If anything, the reverse was true. It was groups like Wham! – or more accurately their forerunners in the 1960s and 1970s, with all their talk of fighting the system, standing up to the Establishment, being who you wanted to be and living your life on your own terms – who opened the door for Mrs Thatcher. By undermining the institutions that had dominated British life for decades, by emphasizing the importance of self-gratification and by celebrating the value of the individual, Lennon and his contemporaries made it much easier for younger voters, in particular, to embrace her free-market message.

The course of training of the yogī was divided into eight stages, reminding us of the eightfold path of Buddhism, but far less practical: (1) Self-control (yama), the practice of the five moral rules: non-violence, truthfulness, not stealing, chastity, and the avoidance of greed. (2) Observance (niyama), the regular and complete observance of the above five rules. (3) Posture (āsana), sitting in certain postures, difficult without practice, which are thought to be essential to meditation. The most famous of these is padmāsna, the “Lotus Posture”, in which the feet are placed on the opposite thighs, and in which gods and sages are commonly depicted. (4) Control of the Breath (prānāyāma), whereby the breath is held and controlled and the respiration forced into unusual rhythms, which are believed to be of great physical and spiritual value. (5) Restraint (pratyāhāra), whereby the sense organs are trained to take no note of their perceptions. (6) Steadying the Mind (dhāranā), by concentration on a single object, such as the tip of the nose, the navel, an icon, or a sacred symbol. (7) Meditation (dhyāna), when the object of concentration fills the whole mind. (8) Deep Meditation (samādhi), when the whole personality is temporarily dissolved.

If you buy an S&P 500 index fund, your investment is highly diversified and its performance will match that of 500 leading U.S. corporations' stocks. Is it possible to lose all of your money? Yes, but the odds of that happening are slim and none. If 500 leading U.S. corporations all have their stock prices plummet to zero, the value of your investment portfolio will be the least of your problems. An economic collapse of that magnitude would make the Great Depression look like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

The Army of Eisenhower’s day valued understatement. With rare exceptions generals did not decorate themselves like Christmas trees. Action spoke for itself. Nothing did that more eloquently than the simple soldier’s funeral of the nation’s thirty-fourth president. On April 2, 1969, in Abilene, Kansas, Eisenhower was laid to rest in the presence of his family. He was buried in a government-issue, eighty-dollar pine coffin, wearing his famous Ike jacket with no medals or decorations other than his insignia of rank.

The cult that told me that I’m not enough, that I need to be famous to be of value, that I need to have money to live a worthwhile life, that I should affiliate, associate and identify on the basis of colour and class, that my role in life is to consume, that I was to live in a darkness only occasionally lit up by billboards and screens, always framing the smiling face of someone trying to sell me something. Sell me phones and food and prejudice, low cost and low values, low-frequency thinking. We are in a cult by default. We just can’t see it because its boundaries lie beyond our horizons.

The conundrum was that conservative media saw Trump as its creature, while Trump saw himself as a star, a vaunted and valued product of all media, one climbing ever higher. It was a cult of personality, and he was the personality. He was the most famous man in the world. Everybody loved him—or ought to.

The great fact all the while however had been the incalculability; since he had supposed himself, from decade to decade, to be allowing, and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy of change. He actually saw that he *had* allowed for nothing; he missed what he would have been sure of finding, he found what he would never have imagined. Proportions and values were upside-down; the ugly things he had expected, the ugly things of his far away youth, when he had too promptly waked up to a sense of the ugly--these uncanny phenomena placed him rather, as it happened, under the charm; whereas the 'swagger' things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had more particularly, like thousands of ingenuous enquirers every year, come over to see, were exactly his sources of dismay. They were as so many set traps for displeasure, above all for reaction, of which his restless tread was constantly pressing the spring. It was interesting, doubtless, the whole show, but it would have been too disconcerting hadn't a certain finer truth saved the situation. He had distinctly not, in this steadier light, come over *all* for the monstrosities; he had come, not only in the last analysis but quite on the face of the act, under an impulse with which they had nothing to do. ("The Jolly Corner")

Some writers, even some poets, become famous public figures, but writers as such have no social status, in the way that doctors and lawyers, whether famous or obscure, have. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the so-called fine arts have lost the social utility they once had. Since the invention of printing and the spread of literacy, verse no longer has a utility value as a mnemonic, a devise by which knowledge and culture were handed on from one generation to the next, and, since the invention of the camera, the draughtsman and painter are no longer needed to provide visual documentation; they have, consequently, become “pure” arts, that is to say, gratuitous activities. Secondly, in a society governed by the values appropriate to Labor (capitalist America may well be more completely governed by these than communist Russia) the gratuitous is no longer regarded – most earlier cultures thought differently – as sacred, because, to Man the Laborer, leisure is not sacred but a respite from laboring, a time for relaxation and the pleasures of consumption. In so far such a society thinks about the gratuitous at all, it is suspicious of it – artists do not labor, therefore, they are probably parasitic idlers – or, at best, regards it as trivial – to write poetry or paint pictures is a harmless private hobby.

Can two walk together, unless they are agreed?’ Amos 3:3 ‘Does This Person Belong in your Life?’ A toxic relationship is like a limb with gangrene: unless you amputate it the infection can spread and kill you. Without the courage to cut off what refuses to heal, you’ll end up losing a lot more. Your personal growth - and in some cases your healing - will only be expedited by establishing relationships with the right people. Maybe you’ve heard the story about the scorpion who asked the frog to carry him across the river because he couldn’t swim. ‘I’m afraid you’ll sting me,’ replied the frog. The scorpion smiled reassuringly and said, ‘Of course I won’t. If I did that we’d both drown!’ So the frog agreed, and the scorpion hopped on his back. Wouldn’t you know it: halfway across the river the scorpion stung him! As they began to sink the frog lamented, ‘You promised you wouldn’t sting me. Why’d you do it?’ The scorpion replied, ‘I can’t help it. It’s my nature!’ Until God changes the other person’s nature, they have the power to affect and infect you. For example, when you feel passionately about something but others don’t, it’s like trying to dance a foxtrot with someone who only knows how to waltz. You picked the wrong dance partner! Don’t get tied up with someone who doesn’t share your values and God-given goals. Some issues can be corrected through counselling, prayer, teaching, and leadership. But you can’t teach someone to care; if they don’t care they’ll pollute your environment, kill your productivity, and break your rhythm with constant complaints. That’s why it’s important to pray and ask God, ‘Does this person belong in my life?

The media might pretend that every life was of equal importance, but they selected people, graded them, decided whether their lives were -- as Ayako put it -- "heavy" or "lightweight," then imposed that set of values on society. The death of a famous person. And the death of someone who wasn't. A tragic death. And one that wasn't.

Over time, the stories became precious inheritances that we assimilated into our lives. However, the value of stories is not in hoarding them but in telling them. You take what you need to learn, to grow, to heal, and then pass them on to others who also want to know themselves and the truth. Our stories make us all wealthy benefactors, enriching any who care to listen. There is no thinking one is too rich and famous, or average and mundane, or poor and inconsequential to tell his or her story, and I believe it is something we must all do. It can be to millions, a roomful, a handful, or just one, but there is someone who needs help somewhere, and you are the only one who can make the difference. Tell your story.

The most famous Diophantine equation in history is the one known as Fermat's last Theorem, the celebrated statement by Pierre de Fermat (1601-55) that there are no whole number solutions to the equation x^n + y^n = z^n, where n is any number greater than 2. When n = 2, there are many solutions (in fact an infinite number). For instance, 3^2 + 4^2 = 5^2 (9 + 16 = 25); or 12^2 +5^2 = 13^2 (144 + 25 = 169). Miraculously, when we go from n = 2 to n = 3, there are no whole numbers x,y,z that satisfy x^3 + y^3 = z^3, and the same is true for any other value of n that is greater than 2. Appropriately, it was in the margin of the second book of Diophantus's Arithmetica, which Fermat was eagerly reading, that he wrote his extraordinary claim-one that took no fewer than 356 years to prove.

The unexamined life is not worth living'...Socrates made provocative remarks like this famous one as part of his daily practice in Athens in the late fourth century B.C. When he made these statements, he was invariably exhorting his fellow Greeks to avoid falling into the trap of what we might call 'ethical complacency,' the point at which an individual ceases trying to become a better person.

framed (people place greater value on moving from 90 percent to 100 percent—high probability to certainty—than from 45 percent to 55 percent, even though they’re both ten percentage points). Prospect Theory explains why we take unwarranted risks in the face of uncertain losses. And the most famous is Loss Aversion, which shows how people are statistically more likely to act to avert a loss than to achieve an equal gain.

The “German problem” after 1970 became how to keep up with the Germans in terms of efficiency and productivity. One way, as above, was to serially devalue, but that was beginning to hurt. The other way was to tie your currency to the deutsche mark and thereby make your price and inflation rate the same as the Germans, which it turned out would also hurt, but in a different way. The problem with keeping up with the Germans is that German industrial exports have the lowest price elasticities in the world. In plain English, Germany makes really great stuff that everyone wants and will pay more for in comparison to all the alternatives. So when you tie your currency to the deutsche mark, you are making a one-way bet that your industry can be as competitive as the Germans in terms of quality and price. That would be difficult enough if the deutsche mark hadn’t been undervalued for most of the postwar period and both German labor costs and inflation rates were lower than average, but unfortunately for everyone else, they were. That gave the German economy the advantage in producing less-than-great stuff too, thereby undercutting competitors in products lower down, as well as higher up the value-added chain. Add to this contemporary German wages, which have seen real declines over the 2000s, and you have an economy that is extremely hard to keep up with. On the other side of this one-way bet were the financial markets. They looked at less dynamic economies, such as the United Kingdom and Italy, that were tying themselves to the deutsche mark and saw a way to make money. The only way to maintain a currency peg is to either defend it with foreign exchange reserves or deflate your wages and prices to accommodate it. To defend a peg you need lots of foreign currency so that when your currency loses value (as it will if you are trying to keep up with the Germans), you can sell your foreign currency reserves and buy back your own currency to maintain the desired rate. But if the markets can figure out how much foreign currency you have in reserve, they can bet against you, force a devaluation of your currency, and pocket the difference between the peg and the new market value in a short sale. George Soros (and a lot of other hedge funds) famously did this to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, blowing the United Kingdom and Italy out of the system. Soros could do this because he knew that there was no way the United Kingdom or Italy could be as competitive as Germany without serious price deflation to increase cost competitiveness, and that there would be only so much deflation and unemployment these countries could take before they either ran out of foreign exchange reserves or lost the next election. Indeed, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism was sometimes referred to as the European “Eternal Recession Mechanism,” such was its deflationary impact. In short, attempts to maintain an anti-inflationary currency peg fail because they are not credible on the following point: you cannot run a gold standard (where the only way to adjust is through internal deflation) in a democracy.

When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet's company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the self-contemplation of a student on a summer afternoon who is reading Euphues. The poem itself would be a subtle series of euphuisms, translating the heat, the day, the student's concerns, into symmetrical posies; translating even his contempt and boredom with that famously foolish book into a euphuism. The poet nodded his big head in a sympathetic, rhythmic way as this was explained to him, then told him that there are two kinds of poems. There is the kind you write; there is the kind you talk about in bars. Both kinds have value and both are poems; but it's fatal to confuse them. In the Seventh Saint, many years later, it had struck him that the difference between himself and Shakespeare wasn't talent - not especially - but nerve. The capacity not to be frightened by his largest and most potent conceptions, to simply (simply!) sit down and execute them. The dreadful lassitude he felt when something really large and multifarious came suddenly clear to him, something Lear-sized yet sonnet-precise. If only they didn't rush on him whole, all at once, massive and perfect, leaving him frightened and nerveless at the prospect of articulating them word by scene by page. He would try to believe they were of the kind told in bars, not the kind to be written, though there was no way to be sure of this except to attempt the writing; he would raise a finger (the novelist in the bar mirror raising the obverse finger) and push forward his change. Wailing like a neglected ghost, the vast notion would beat its wings into the void. Sometimes it would pursue him for days and years as he fled desperately. Sometimes he would turn to face it, and do battle. Once, twice, he had been victorious, objectively at least. Out of an immense concatenation of feeling, thought, word, transcendent meaning had come his first novel, a slim, pageant of a book, tombstone for his slain conception. A publisher had taken it, gingerly; had slipped it quietly into the deep pool of spring releases, where it sank without a ripple, and where he supposes it lies still, its calm Bodoni gone long since green. A second, just as slim but more lurid, nightmarish even, about imaginary murders in an imaginary exotic locale, had been sold for a movie, though the movie had never been made. He felt guilt for the producer's failure (which perhaps the producer didn't feel), having known the book could not be filmed; he had made a large sum, enough to finance years of this kind of thing, on a book whose first printing was largely returned.

You would have thought, listening to my bowdlerized version of what was a tepid enough little life history, that rather than having received a warm and gracious letter from the famous writer inviting me to come and spend a pleasant evening in his house, I had made this journey to plead a matter of utmost personal urgency before the most stringent of inquisitors, and that if I made one wrong move, something of immeasurable value to me would be lost forever.

Behavioural economics is an odd term. As Warren Buffett’s business partner Charlie Munger once said, ‘If economics isn’t behavioural, I don’t know what the hell is.’ It’s true: in a more sensible world, economics would be a subdiscipline of psychology.* Adam Smith was as much a behavioural economist as an economist – The Wealth of Nations (1776) doesn’t contain a single equation. But, strange though it may seem, the study of economics has long been detached from how people behave in the real world, preferring to concern itself with a parallel universe in which people behave as economists think they should. It is to correct this circular logic that behavioural economics – made famous by experts such as Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Dan Ariely and Richard Thaler – has come to prominence. In many areas of policy and business there is much more value to be found in understanding how people behave in reality than how they should behave in theory.

As a firstborn I also had a duty to succeed my father and look after my mother and siblings. Although school taught me that this was an outdated practice and that I would have been better off focusing on inheriting my father's assets for my own benefit, it was the strong emphasis on family values that ultimately prevailed. This was not because they had sounded good on paper or had been presented by a world-famous researcher, but because I saw they worked through my experience.

We live in a time when lots of people want to be famous. It’s particularly a problem with young entrepreneurs. Fame has become a toxic desire for many people. Because fame is worthless unless it is a tool to glorify God. And even in the marketplace, what matters most is your ability to add value to other peoples lives. It’s about service through adding value. And the best form of payment for that is money, not fame. So a lot of people need to really forget about fame and instead focus on value.

I am praising that famous individualism associated with Western and American myth... Tightly knit communities in which members look to one another for identity, and to establish meaning and value, are disabled and often dangerous, however polished their veneer... The cult of the individual is properly aesthetic and religious. The significance of every human destiny is absolute and equal... Only lonesomeness allows one to experience this sort of radical singularity, one's greatest dignity and privilege.

Warren Buffet famously said, “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.” On a personal note, I applied this strategy in recent years, and it dramatically improved my happiness. Instead of accepting every offer that came my way, I said no to a bunch of things like public speaking gigs, side projects that were a distraction, people who didn’t add value to my life, and every business opportunity that didn’t perfectly align with my current goals.

Patrick Henry said ‘give me liberty or give me death.’ I think his famous quote makes it crystal clear that the Constitutional framework of this country values liberty as an essential element of life, worth dying for. If something is worth such a sacrifice, how can the loss of it be justified for the argument that it will make us safer to give up our liberty and our civil rights? Are we to tell the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers of all the soldiers lost in foreign wars that it was all a big lie? That they died for nothing?

In ancient Iran, for example, every single person or object in the mundane world (getik) was held to have its counterpart in the archetypal world of sacred reality (menok). This is a perspective that is difficult for us to appreciate in the modern world, since we see autonomy and independence as supreme human values. Yet the famous tag post coitum omne animal tristis est still expresses a common experience: after an intense and eagerly anticipated moment, we often feel that we have missed something greater that remains just beyond our grasp.

For you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” Those are probably the most famous words ever spoken on the subject of truth. Most of us accept that particular sentence at face value. It certainly resonates with our spirit. It just feels right. But what does it mean, really? And have you ever contemplated the meaning that comes to light by inverting this principle? If it is correct that “you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free,” then is it possible that if you don’t know the truth, its absence can place you in bondage?

Political economist and sociologist Max Weber famously spoke of the “disenchantment of the world,” as rationalization and science led Europe and America into modern industrial society, pushing back religion and all “magical” theories about reality. Now we are witnessing the disenchantment of the self. One of the many dangers in this process is that if we remove the magic from our image of ourselves, we may also remove it from our image of others. We could become disenchanted with one another. Our image of Homo sapiens underlies our everyday practice and culture; it shapes the way we treat one another as well as how we subjectively experience ourselves. In Western societies, the Judeo-Christian image of humankind—whether you are a believer or not—has secured a minimal moral consensus in everyday life. It has been a major factor in social cohesion. Now that the neurosciences have irrevocably dissolved the Judeo-Christian image of a human being as containing an immortal spark of the divine, we are beginning to realize that they have not substituted anything that could hold society together and provide a common ground for shared moral intuitions and values. An anthropological and ethical vacuum may well follow on the heels of neuroscientific findings. This is a dangerous situation. One potential scenario is that long before neuroscientists and philosophers have settled any of the perennial issues—for example, the nature of the self, the freedom of the will, the relationship between mind and brain, or what makes a person a person—a vulgar materialism might take hold. More and more people will start telling themselves: “I don’t understand what all these neuroexperts and consciousness philosophers are talking about, but the upshot seems pretty clear to me. The cat is out of the bag: We are gene-copying bio- robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe. We have brains but no immortal souls, and after seventy years or so the curtain drops. There will never be an afterlife, or any kind of reward or punishment for anyone, and ultimately everyone is alone. I get the message, and you had better believe I will adjust my behavior to it. It would probably be smart not to let anybody know I’ve seen through the game.

Too many film schools, as well as any number of screenwriting gurus and an obscene number of how-to-write tomes, have made a business of catering to fledgling screenwriters and filmmakers by exploiting their belief that the only thing standing between them and an Oscar is the right kind of knowledge. If only one knew enough, one could easily become rich and famous. Unfortunately, almost all are susceptible to that eternal malady – “that last great infirmity of the soul” – which is FAME. And whilst I don’t deny the value of technical knowledge, such knowledge matters very little if the story one is trying to tell doesn’t matter, either because it’s incoherent or simply because it fails to make us care.

Hölderlin's sense of loss and destitution was not simply due to a personal predilection for suffering, but was part of a larger cultural phenomenon that arose from powerful currents seething under the Enlightenment—an increasing alienation from nature and a growing sense of disenchantment in the face of a triumphant rationality and waning traditions and values. Hölderlin was not alone in perceiving these changes and experiencing them deeply. Hegel, for example, famously wrote of alienated consciousness, and Schiller described modern human beings as "stunted plants, that show only a feeble vestige of their nature." Hölderlin, for his part, reacted to these currents with an almost overwhelming longing for lost wholeness.

The coffee served in the coffeehouses wasn’t necessarily very good coffee. Because of the way coffee was taxed in Britain (by the gallon), the practice was to brew it in large batches, store it cold in barrels, and reheat it a little at a time for serving. So coffee’s appeal in Britain had less to do with being a quality beverage than with being a social lubricant. People went to coffeehouses to meet people of shared interests, gossip, read the latest journals and newspapers—a brand-new word and concept in the 1660s—and exchange information of value to their lives and business. Some took to using coffeehouses as their offices—as, most famously, at Lloyd’s Coffee House on Lombard Street, which gradually evolved into Lloyd’s insurance market.

Unless we do conscious work on it, the shadow is almost always projected; that is, it is neatly laid on someone or something else so we do not have to take responsibility for it. This is the way things were done five hundred years ago, and most of us are still stuck in this medieval consciousness. The medieval world was based on mutual shadow projection; it thrived on a fortress mentality, armor, walled cities, possession by force, ownership of anything feminine by male prerogative, royal patronage, and city-states in perpetual siege at each other’s gates. Medieval society was almost entirely ruled by patriarchal values that are famous for their one-sidedness. Even the Church took part in shadow politics. Saints like Benedictine monasteries and some of the esoteric societies avoided the projecting game.

Freedom from Expectations I don’t measure my effectiveness at all. I don’t believe in self-measurement. I feel like this is a form of self-discipline, self-punishment, and self-conflict. [1] If you hurt other people because they have expectations of you, that’s their problem. If they have an agreement with you, it’s your problem. But, if they have an expectation of you, that’s completely their problem. It has nothing to do with you. They’re going to have lots of expectations out of life. The sooner you can dash their expectations, the better. [1] Courage isn’t charging into a machine gun nest. Courage is not caring what other people think. Anyone who has known me for a long time knows my defining characteristic is a combination of being very impatient and willful. I don’t like to wait. I hate wasting time. I’m very famous for being rude at parties, events, dinners, where the moment I figure out it’s a waste of my time, I leave immediately. Value your time. It is all you have. It’s more important than your money. It’s more important than your friends. It is more important than anything. Your time is all you have. Do not waste your time. This doesn’t mean you can’t relax. As long as you’re doing what you want, it’s not a waste of your time. But if you’re not spending your time doing what you want, and you’re not earning, and you’re not learning—what the heck are you doing? Don’t spend your time making other people happy. Other people being happy is their problem. It’s not your problem. If you are happy, it makes other people happy. If you’re happy, other people will ask you how you became happy and they might learn from it, but you are not responsible for making other people happy. [10]

There is only one historical development that has real significance. Today, when we finally realise that the keys to happiness are in the hands of our biochemical system, we can stop wasting our time on politics and social reforms, putsches and ideologies, and focus instead on the only thing that can make us truly happy: manipulating our biochemistry. If we invest billions in understanding our brain chemistry and developing appropriate treatments, we can make people far happier than ever before, without any need of revolutions. Prozac, for example, does not change regimes, but by raising serotonin levels it lifts people out of their depression. Nothing captures the biological argument better than the famous New Age slogan: ‘Happiness begins within.’ Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions – none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.1 In Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World, published in 1932 at the height of the Great Depression, happiness is the supreme value and psychiatric drugs replace the police and the ballot as the foundation of politics. Every day, each person takes a dose of ‘soma’, a synthetic drug which makes people happy without harming their productivity and efficiency. The World State that governs the entire globe is never threatened by wars, revolutions, strikes or demonstrations, because all people are supremely content with their current conditions, whatever they may be. Huxley’s vision of the future is far more troubling than George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Huxley’s world seems monstrous to most readers, but it is hard to explain why. Everybody is happy all the time – what could be wrong with that?

Today Hindu revivalists, pious Muslims, Japanese nationalists and Chinese communists may declare their adherence to very different values and goals, but they have all come to believe that economic growth is the key to realising their disparate goals. Thus in 2014 the devout Hindu Narendra Modi was elected prime minister of India thanks largely to his success in boosting economic growth in his home state of Gujarat, and to the widely held view that only he could reinvigorate the sluggish national economy. Analogous views have kept the Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in power in Turkey since 2003. The name of his party – the Justice and Development Party – highlights its commitment to economic development, and the Erdoğan government has indeed managed to maintain impressive growth rates for more than a decade. Japan’s prime minister, the nationalist Shinzō Abe, came to office in 2012 pledging to jolt the Japanese economy out of two decades of stagnation. His aggressive and somewhat unusual measures to achieve this have been nicknamed Abenomics. Meanwhile in neighbouring China the Communist Party still pays lip service to traditional Marxist–Leninist ideals, but in practice is guided by Deng Xiaoping’s famous maxims that ‘development is the only hard truth’ and that ‘it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice’. Which means, in plain language: do whatever it takes to promote economic growth, even if Marx and Lenin wouldn’t have been happy with it. In Singapore, as befits that no-nonsense city-state, they pursue this line of thinking even further, and peg ministerial salaries to the national GDP. When the Singaporean economy grows, government ministers get a raise, as if that is what their jobs are all about.2

I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN most interested in the question of what makes a house a home. What are the elements that move a house beyond its physical structure and provide the warmth that we all crave? In my fifteen years as a designer, I’ve come to understand that the answer is simple: It is about surrounding ourselves with things we love. (...) And in this case, the beauty comes from the owners’ love of books. Books are beautiful objects in their own right—their bindings and covers—and the space they fill on shelves or stacked on coffee tables in colorful piles add balance and texture to any room. And just like any other part of a home, books require maintenance: They need to be dusted, categorized, rearranged, and maintained. Our relationship with them is dynamic and ever changing. But our connection to them goes beyond the material. In each house we visited, the libraries were the heart of the home, meaningful to the collectors’ lives. In this book, we tried to capture what they brought to the home—the life and spirit books added. Some subjects have working libraries they constantly reference; others fill their shelves with the potential pleasures of the unread. When we visited the homes, many people could find favorite books almost by osmosis, using systems known only to themselves. (...) As we found repeatedly, surrounding yourself with books you love tells the story of your life, your interests, your passions, your values. Your past and your future. Books allow us to escape, and our personal libraries allow us to invent the story of ourselves—and the legacy that we will leave behind. There’s a famous quote attributed to Cicero: “A room without books is like a body without a soul.” If I suspected this before, I know it now. I hope you’ll find as much pleasure in discovering these worlds as we did.

So few were the readers at that time in Philadelphia, and the majority of us so poor, that I was not able, with great industry; to find more than fifty persons, mostly young tradesmen, willing to pay down for this purpose forty shillings each, and ten shillings per annum. On this little fund we began. The books were imported; the library was opened one day in the week for lending to the subscribers, on their promissory notes to pay double the value if not duly returned. The institution soon manifested its utility, was imitated by other towns, and in other provinces. The libraries were augmented by donations; reading became fashionable; and our people, having no publick amusements to divert their attention from study, became better acquainted with books, and in a few years were observ'd by strangers to be better instructed and more intelligent than people of the same rank generally are in other countries.

The Louvre’s much restored three wings or pavilions, the Sully, Denon, and Richelieu, were once the galleries where courtiers enjoyed royal hospitality and entertainments (and The Princesse de Clèves her secret surges of immoral passion). On a quiet un-crowded evening visit to the Louvre, it’s easy to imagine the masked and dancing couples in these pavilions, the rustle of silk, the whisperings of lovers, the royal entourage. The Louvre’s art collection was the result of François I’s enterprising enthusiasm for Italian art. He imported masterpieces by Uccello, Titian, Giorgione, and, most notably, Leonardo da Vinci himself, whose Mona Lisa—La Joconde in French—was and remains the most valued painting in the royal collection. Montaigne does not mention the paintings or the Italian sculptor Benvenuto Cellini whom François also imported to help transform gloomy Paris into a city of bright and saucy opulence.

From science, then, if it must be so, let man learn the philosophic truth that there is no material universe; its warp and woof is maya, illusion. Its mirages of reality all break down under analysis. As one by one the reassuring props of a physical cosmos crash beneath him, man dimly perceives his idolatrous reliance, his past transgression of the divine command: “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” In his famous equation outlining the equivalence of mass and energy, Einstein proved that the energy in any particle of matter is equal to its mass or weight multiplied by the square of the velocity of light. The release of the atomic energies is brought about through the annihilation of the material particles. The ‘death’ of matter has been the ‘birth’ of an Atomic Age. Light-velocity is a mathematical standard or constant not because there is an absolute value in 186,000 miles a second, but because no material body, whose mass increases with its velocity, can ever attain the velocity of light. Stated another way: only a material body whose mass is infinite could equal the velocity of light. This conception brings us to the law of miracles. The masters who are able to materialise and dematerialise their bodies or any other object and to move with the velocity of light, and to utilise the creative light-rays in bringing into instant visibility any physical manifestation, have fulfilled the necessary Einsteinian condition: their mass is infinite. The consciousness of a perfected yogi is effortlessly identified, not with a narrow body, but with the universal structure. Gravitation, whether the ‘force’ of Newton or the Einsteinian ‘manifestation of inertia’, is powerless to compel a master to exhibit the property of ‘weight’ which is the distinguishing gravitational condition of all material objects. He who knows himself as the omnipresent Spirit is subject no longer to the rigidities of a body in time and space. Their imprisoning ‘rings-pass-not’ have yielded to the solvent: “I am He.

From every direction, the place is under assault—and unlike in the past, the adversary is not concentrated in a single force, such as the Bureau of Reclamation, but takes the form of separate outfits conducting smaller attacks that are, in many ways, far more insidious. From directly above, the air-tour industry has succeeded in scuttling all efforts to dial it back, most recently through the intervention of Arizona’s senators, John Kyl and John McCain, and is continuing to destroy one of the canyon’s greatest treasures, which is its silence. From the east has come a dramatic increase in uranium-mining claims, while the once remote and untrammeled country of the North Rim now suffers from an ever-growing influx of recreational ATVs. On the South Rim, an Italian real estate company recently secured approval for a massive development whose water demands are all but guaranteed to compromise many of the canyon’s springs, along with the oases that they nourish. Worst of all, the Navajo tribe is currently planning to cooperate in constructing a monstrous tramway to the bottom of the canyon, complete with a restaurant and a resort, at the confluence of the Little Colorado and the Colorado, the very spot where John Wesley Powell made his famous journal entry in the summer of 1869 about venturing “down the Great Unknown.” As vexing as all these things are, what Litton finds even more disheartening is the country’s failure to rally to the canyon’s defense—or for that matter, to the defense of its other imperiled natural wonders. The movement that he and David Brower helped build is not only in retreat but finds itself the target of bottomless contempt. On talk radio and cable TV, environmentalists are derided as “wackos” and “extremists.” The country has swung decisively toward something smaller and more selfish than what it once was, and in addition to ushering in a disdain for the notion that wilderness might have a value that extends beyond the metrics of economics or business, much of the nation ignorantly embraces the benefits of engineering and technology while simultaneously rejecting basic science.

And then, as slowly as the light fades on a calm winter evening, something went out of our relationship. I say that selfishly. Perhaps I started to look for something which had never been there in the first place: passion, romance. I aresay that as I entered my forties I had a sense that somehow life was going past me. I had hardly experienced those emotions which for me have mostly come from reading books or watching television. I suppose that if there was anything unsatisfactory in our marriage, it was in my perception of it—the reality was unchanged. Perhaps I grew up from childhood to manhood too quickly. One minute I was cutting up frogs in the science lab at school, the next I was working for the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence and counting freshwater mussel populations on riverbeds. Somewhere in between, something had passed me by: adolescence, perhaps? Something immature, foolish yet intensely emotive, like those favourite songs I had recalled dimly as if being played on a distant radio, almost too far away to make out the words. I had doubts, yearnings, but I did not know why or what for. Whenever I tried to analyse our lives, and talk about it with Mary, she would say, ‘Darling, you are on the way to becoming one of the leading authorities in the world on caddis fly larvae. Don’t allow anything to deflect you from that. You may be rather inadequately paid, certainly compared with me you are, but excellence in any field is an achievement beyond value.’ I don’t know when we started drifting apart. When I told Mary about the project—I mean about researching the possibility of a salmon fishery in the Yemen—something changed. If there was a defining moment in our marriage, then that was it. It was ironical, in a sense. For the first time in my life I was doing something which might bring me international recognition and certainly would make me considerably better off—I could live for years off the lecture circuit alone, if the project was even half successful. Mary didn’t like it. I don’t know what part she didn’t like: the fact I might become more famous than her, the fact I might even become better paid than her. That makes her sound carping.

Freud famously saw the ‘horror’ of Medusa’s head as a symbol of male castration, but the original trauma in the Medusa story is not castration but rape. Most scholars and historians dismiss Poseidon’s rape of Medusa as an insignificant detail, merely one among so many rapes of mortal, immortal and semi-divine women committed by male gods. However, myths which glorify rape as a strategy ‘to enact the principle of domination by means of sex’ are comparatively recent, becoming widespread in Attica around the 5th century BCE. It is likely that myths celebrating rape reflect a devastating historical shift in cultural values, the change from a society based on equality and partnership to a hierarchical structure based on unequal distribution of resources and the need to control women’s sexuality. Joseph Campbell describes the myth of Perseus and Medusa as reflecting ‘an actual historic rupture, a sort of sociological trauma’ which occurred in the early thirteenth century B.C.E. The myth may refer to the overrunning of the peaceful, sedentary, matrifocal and most likely matrilineal early civilizations of Old Europe by patriarchal warlike Indo-European invaders.

But I have said enough about the negative side of the anima. There are just as many important positive aspects. The anima is, for instance, responsible for the fact that a man is able to find the right marriage partner. Another function is at least equally important: Whenever a man’s logical mind is incapable of discerning facts that are hidden in his unconscious, the anima helps him to dig them out. Even more vital is the role that the anima plays in putting a man’s mind in tune with the right inner values and thereby opening the way into more profound inner depths. It is as if an inner “radio” becomes tuned to a certain wave length that excludes irrelevancies but allows the voice of the Great Man to be heard. In establishing this inner “radio” reception, the anima takes on the role of guide, or mediator, to the world within and to the Self. That is how she appears in the example of the initiations of shamans that I described earlier; this is the role of Beatrice in Dante’s Paradiso, and also of the goddess Isis when she appeared in a dream to Apuleius, the famous author of The Golden Ass, in order to initiate him into a higher, more spiritual form of life.

Modern art always projects itself into a twilight zone where no values are fixed. It is always born in anxiety, at least since Cézanne. And Picasso once said that what matters most to us in Cézanne, more than his pictures, is his anxiety. It seems to me a function of modern art to transmit this anxiety to the spectator, so that his encounter with the work is--at least while the work is new-- a genuine existential predicament. Like Kierkegaard's God, the work molests us with its aggressive absurdity [...]. It demands a decision in which you discover something of your own quality; and this decision is always a "leap of faith," to use Kierkegaard's famous term. And like Kierkegaard's God, who demands a sacrifice from Abraham in violation of every moral standard: like Kierkegaard's God, the picture seems arbitrary, cruel, irrational, demanding your faith, while it makes no promise of future rewards. In other words, it is in the nature of original contemporary art to present itself as a bad risk. And we the public, artists included, should be proud of being in this predicament, because nothing else would seem to us quite true to life; and art, after all, is supposed to be a mirror of life.

In any long fiction, Henry James remarked, use of the first-person point of view is barbaric. James may go too far, but his point is worth considering. First person locks us in one character's mind, locks us to one kind of diction throughout, locks out possibilities of going deeply into various characters' minds and so forth. ....Vulgar diction in the telling of the Helen story would clearly create a white-hot irony, probably all but unmanageable. Colloquial diction and relatively short sentences would have the instant effect of humanizing once elevated characters and events. Highly formal diction and all that goes along with the traditional omniscient narrator might seem immediately appropriate for the seriousness of the story, but it can easily backfire, providing not suitable pomp but mere pompousness. And some choices in p.o.v. as well as in other stylistic elements, may have more direct bearing on the theme than would others. For instance, the "town" point of view, in which the voice in the story is some unnamed spokesman for all the community--among the most famous examples is Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"--might have the immediate effect of foregrounding the story's controlling idea, conflicting community values versus personal values.

Congress decided to put him on a committee to write a declaration explaining why the colonies were seeking independence. It was back in the days when Congress knew how to appoint really good committees: Franklin and Jefferson and John Adams were on it. They knew that leadership required not merely asserting values, but finding a balance when values conflict. We can see that in the deft editing of the famous sentence that opens the second paragraph of the Declaration. “We hold these truths to be sacred . . . ,” Jefferson had written. On the copy of his draft at the Library of Congress we can see the dark printer’s ink and backslashes of Franklin’s pen as he changes it to “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” His point was that our rights would come from rationality and the consent of the governed, not the dictates and dogma of any religion. Jefferson’s draft sentence went on to say that all men have certain inalienable rights. We can see Adams’s hand making an addition: “They are endowed by their Creator” with these inalienable rights. So just in the editing of one half of one sentence we can see how Franklin and his colleagues struck a unifying balance between the grace of divine providence and the role of democratic consent in the founding values of our nation.

I grew convinc'd that truth, sincerity and integrity in dealings between man and man were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life; and I form'd written resolutions, which still remain in my journal book, to practice them ever while I lived. Revelation had indeed no weight with me, as such; but I entertain'd an opinion that, though certain actions might not be bad because they were forbidden by it, or good because it commanded them, yet probably these actions might be forbidden because they were bad for us, or commanded because they were beneficial to us, in their own natures, all the circumstances of things considered. And this persuasion, with the kind hand of Providence, or some guardian angel, or accidental favorable circumstances and situations, or all together, preserved me, thro' this dangerous time of youth, and the hazardous situations I was sometimes in among strangers, remote from the eye and advice of my father, without any willful gross immorality or injustice, that might have been expected from my want of religion. I say willful, because the instances I have mentioned had something of necessity in them, from my youth, inexperience, and the knavery of others. I had therefore a tolerable character to begin the world with; I valued it properly, and determin'd to preserve it.

After moving his family from Yakima to Paradise, California, in 1958, he enrolled at Chico State College. There, he began an apprenticeship under the soon-to-be-famous John Gardner, the first "real writer" he had ever met. "He offered me the key to his office," Carver recalled in his preface to Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist (1983). "I see that gift now as a turning point." In addition, Gardner gave his student "close, line-by-line criticism" and taught him a set of values that was "not negotiable." Among these values were convictions that Carver held until his death. Like Gardner, whose On Moral Fiction (1978) decried the "nihilism" of postmodern formalism, Carver maintained that great literature is life-connected, life-affirming, and life-changing. "In the best fiction," he wrote "the central character, the hero or heroine, is also the ‘moved’ character, the one to whom something happens in the story that makes a difference. Something happens that changes the way that character looks at himself and hence the world." Through the 1960s and 1970s he steered wide of the metafictional "funhouse" erected by Barth, Barthelme and Company, concentrating instead on what he called "those basics of old-fashioned storytelling: plot, character, and action." Like Gardner and Chekhov, Carver declared himself a humanist. "Art is not self-expression," he insisted, "it’s communication.

One of our best dates was actually a weekend when we went to the wedding of a friend from the Teams. The couple married in Wimberley, Texas, a small town maybe forty miles south of Austin and a few hours’ drive from where we lived. We were having such a pleasant day, we didn’t want it to end. “It doesn’t have to end,” suggested Chris as we headed for the car. “The kids are at my parents’ for the weekend. Where do you want to go?” We googled for hotels and found a place in San Antonio, a little farther south. Located around the corner from the Alamo, the hotel seemed tailor-made for Chris. There was history in every floorboard. He loved the authentic Texan and Old West touches, from the lobby to the rooms. He read every framed article on the walls and admired each artifact. We walked through halls where famous lawmen-and maybe an outlaw or two-had trod a hundred years before. In the evening, we relaxed with coffee out on the balcony of our room-something we’d never managed to do when we actually owned one. It was one of those perfect days you dream of, completely unplanned. I have a great picture of Chris sitting out there in his cowboy boots, feet propped up, a big smile on his face. It’s still one of my favorites. People ask about Chris’s love of the Old West. It was something he was born with, really. It had to be in his genes. He grew up watching old westerns with his family, and for a time became a bronco-bustin’ cowboy and ranch hand. More than that, I think the clear sense of right and wrong, of frontier justice and strong values, appealed to him.

The tyro knows nothing, and everybody, including himself, knows it. But the next, or second, grade thinks he knows a great deal and makes others feel that way too. He is the experienced sucker, who has studied not the market itself but a few remarks about the market made by a still higher grade of suckers. The second-grade sucker knows how to keep from losing his money in some of the ways that get the raw beginner. It is this semisucker rather than the 100 per cent article who is the real all-the-year-round support of the commission houses. He lasts about three and a half years on an average, as compared with a single season of from three to thirty weeks, which is the usual Wall Street life of a first offender. It is naturally the semisucker who is always quoting the famous trading aphorisms and the various rules of the game. He knows all the don'ts that ever fell from the oracular lips of the old stagers excepting the principal one, which is: Don't be a sucker! This semisucker is the type that thinks he has cut his wisdom teeth because he loves to buy on declines. He waits for them. He measures his bargains by the number of points it has sold off from the top. In big bull markets the plain unadulterated sucker, utterly ignorant of rules and precedents, buys blindly because he hopes blindly. He makes most of the money until one of the healthy reactions takes it away from him at one fell swoop. But the Careful Mike sucker does what I did when I thought I was playing the game intelligently according to the intelligence of others. I knew I needed to change my bucket-shop methods and I thought I was solving my problem with any change, particularly one that assayed high gold values according to the experienced traders among the customers.

When you are fully owned by your disbelief, then there is no further discussion that needs to be had between you and the God you once trusted. In fact, your very senses are numb to His presence, your eyes shut, your ears closed, and your body turned away. In this instance you have come to grips with the fact that, if need be, you would stand up in front of the world and say, “I deny Jesus is Lord,” and you would be content with that denial. But before you jump to your feet, first consider that this verbal rejection of Jesus comes with an effect, and that is that as you deny Him, so He denies you. As He said in the book of Matthew, “Whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 10:33 esv). So is it any wonder that in your denial of the One who was sent to save you, you have found more and more animosity toward God and His people? That your heart has hardened more with each passing day? This is the result of Jesus denying you more than it is of you denying Him. The truth is that you own your faith when and only when Christ owns you. William Barley, in The Letters of James and Peter, spoke this better than we ever could when he said, It frequently happens that the value of a thing lies in the fact that someone has possessed it. A very ordinary thing acquires a new value if it has been possessed by some famous person. In any museum we will find quite ordinary things—clothes, a walking-stick, a pen, pieces of furniture—which are only of value because they were possessed and used by some great person. It is the ownership which gives them worth. It is so with the Christian. The Christian may be a very ordinary person, but he acquires a new value and dignity and greatness because he belongs to God. The greatness of the Christian lies in the fact that he is God’s.

Aristotle very famously said in his Politics I.V.8 that some people are born to be slaves. He meant that some people are not as capable of higher rational thought and therefore should do the work that frees the more talented and brilliant to pursue a life of honor and culture. Modern people bristle with outrage at such a statement, but while we do not today hold with the idea of literal slavery, the attitudes behind Aristotle’s statement are alive and well. Christian philosopher Lee Hardy and many others have argued that this “Greek attitude toward work and its place in human life was largely preserved in both the thought and practice of the Christian church” through the centuries, and still holds a great deal of influence today in our culture.43 What has come down to us is a set of pervasive ideas. One is that work is a necessary evil. The only good work, in this view, is work that helps make us money so that we can support our families and pay others to do menial work. Second, we believe that lower-status or lower-paying work is an assault on our dignity. One result of this belief is that many people take jobs that they are not suited for at all, choosing to aim for careers that do not fit their gifts but promise higher wages and prestige. Western societies are increasingly divided between the highly remunerated “knowledge classes” and the more poorly remunerated “service sector,” and most of us accept and perpetuate the value judgments that attach to these categories. Another result is that many people will choose to be unemployed rather than do work that they feel is beneath them, and most service and manual labor falls into this category. Often people who have made it into the knowledge classes show great disdain for the concierges, handymen, dry cleaners, cooks, gardeners, and others who hold service jobs.

the device had the property of transresistance and should have a name similar to devices such as the thermistor and varistor, Pierce proposed transistor. Exclaimed Brattain, “That’s it!” The naming process still had to go through a formal poll of all the other engineers, but transistor easily won the election over five other options.35 On June 30, 1948, the press gathered in the auditorium of Bell Labs’ old building on West Street in Manhattan. The event featured Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain as a group, and it was moderated by the director of research, Ralph Bown, dressed in a somber suit and colorful bow tie. He emphasized that the invention sprang from a combination of collaborative teamwork and individual brilliance: “Scientific research is coming more and more to be recognized as a group or teamwork job. . . . What we have for you today represents a fine example of teamwork, of brilliant individual contributions, and of the value of basic research in an industrial framework.”36 That precisely described the mix that had become the formula for innovation in the digital age. The New York Times buried the story on page 46 as the last item in its “News of Radio” column, after a note about an upcoming broadcast of an organ concert. But Time made it the lead story of its science section, with the headline “Little Brain Cell.” Bell Labs enforced the rule that Shockley be in every publicity photo along with Bardeen and Brattain. The most famous one shows the three of them in Brattain’s lab. Just as it was about to be taken, Shockley sat down in Brattain’s chair, as if it were his desk and microscope, and became the focal point of the photo. Years later Bardeen would describe Brattain’s lingering dismay and his resentment of Shockley: “Boy, Walter hates this picture. . . . That’s Walter’s equipment and our experiment,

Of course, in the end a sense of mutual understanding isn’t enough. After all, talk is cheap; like any value, empathy must be acted upon. When I was a community organizer back in the eighties, I would often challenge neighborhood leaders by asking them where they put their time, energy, and money. Those are the true tests of what we value, I’d tell them, regardless of what we like to tell ourselves. If we aren’t willing to pay a price for our values, if we aren’t willing to make some sacrifices in order to realize them, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all. By these standards at least, it sometimes appears that Americans today value nothing so much as being rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained. We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt. We say we believe in equal opportunity but then stand idle while millions of American children languish in poverty. We insist that we value family, but then structure our economy and organize our lives so as to ensure that our families get less and less of our time. And yet a part of us knows better. We hang on to our values, even if they seem at times tarnished and worn; even if, as a nation and in our own lives, we have betrayed them more often than we care to remember. What else is there to guide us? Those values are our inheritance, what makes us who we are as a people. And although we recognize that they are subject to challenge, can be poked and prodded and debunked and turned inside out by intellectuals and cultural critics, they have proven to be both surprisingly durable and surprisingly constant across classes, and races, and faiths, and generations. We can make claims on their behalf, so long as we understand that our values must be tested against fact and experience, so long as we recall that they demand deeds and not just words. To do otherwise would be to relinquish our best selves.

I’ve worn Niki’s pants for two days now. I thought a third day in the same clothes might be pushing it.” Ian shrugged with indifference. “It might send Derian through the roof, but it doesn’t bother me. Wear what you want to wear.” Eena wrinkled her nose at him. “Do you really feel that way or are you trying to appear more laissez-faire than Derian?” “More laissez-faire?” “Yes. That’s a real word.” “Two words actually,” he grinned. “Laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va de lui même!" He coated the words with a heavy French accent. Eena gawked at him. “Since when do you speak French?” “I don’t.” Ian chuckled. “But I did do some research in world history the year I followed you around on Earth. Physics was a joke, but history—that I found fascinating.” Slapping a hand against her chest, Eena exclaimed, “I can’t believe it! Unbeknownst to me, Ian actually studied something in high school other than the library’s collection of sci-fi paperbacks!” He grimaced at her exaggerated performance before defending his preferred choice of reading material. “Hey, popular literature is a valuable and enlightening form of world history. You would know that if you read a book or two.” She ignored his reproach and asked with curiosity, “What exactly did you say?” “In French?” “Duh, yes.” “Don’t ‘duh’ me, you could easily have been referring to my remark about enlightening literature. I know the value of a good book is hard for you to comprehend.” He grinned crookedly at her look of offense and then moved into an English translation of his French quote. “Let it do and let it pass, the world goes on by itself.” “Hmm. And where did that saying come from?” Ian delivered his answer with a surprisingly straight face. “That is what the French Monarch said when his queen began dressing casually. The French revolution started one week following that famous declaration, right after the queen was beheaded by the rest of the aristocracy in her favorite pair of scroungy jeans.” “You are such a brazen-tongued liar!

And one of the things that has most obstructed the path of discipleship in our Christian culture today is this idea that it will be a terribly difficult thing that will certainly ruin your life. A typical and often-told story in Christian circles is of those who have refused to surrender their lives to God for fear he would “send them to Africa as missionaries.” And here is the whole point of the much misunderstood teachings of Luke 14. There Jesus famously says one must “hate” all their family members and their own life also, must take their cross, and must forsake all they own, or they “cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26–27, 33). The entire point of this passage is that as long as one thinks anything may really be more valuable than fellowship with Jesus in his kingdom, one cannot learn from him. People who have not gotten the basic facts about their life straight will therefore not do the things that make learning from Jesus possible and will never be able to understand the basic points in the lessons to be learned. It is like a mathematics teacher in high school who might say to a student, “Verily, verily I say unto thee, except thou canst do decimals and fractions, thou canst in no wise do algebra.” It is not that the teacher will not allow you to do algebra because you are a bad person; you just won’t be able to do basic algebra if you are not in command of decimals and fractions. So this counting of the cost is not a moaning and groaning session. “Oh how terrible it is that I have to value all of my ‘wonderful’ things (which are probably making life miserable and hopeless anyway) less than I do living in the kingdom! How terrible that I must be prepared to actually surrender them should that be called for!” The counting of the cost is to bring us to the point of clarity and decisiveness. It is to help us to see. Counting the cost is precisely what the man with the pearl and the hidden treasure did. Out of it came their decisiveness and joy. It is decisiveness and joy that are the outcomes of the counting.

The free market system of capitalism enhances freedom in three ways. Traditionally freedom of exchange has been seen as a basic form of individual freedom, with which it would be wrong to interfere, and in this sense is a basic, negative freedom like the freedom of speech, assembly, the press, or conscience. Gerald Gaus, a liberal defender of the morality of markets, summarizes the liberal case for freedom in capitalism: “classical liberalism embraces market relations because (but not, of course, only because) they (1) are essentially free, (2) respect the actual choices of individuals, and (3) legitimately express different individuals’ rational decisions about the proper choice between competing ends, goods, and values.”98 Market freedom is necessary to respect individuals as free choosers and designers of their own “experiments in living,” as Mill famously puts it.99 Free markets also have positive aspects, however, in providing opportunities by increasing persons’ material wealth in order to choose things that they value. Another aspect of the positive freedom that markets promote is the freedom of persons to develop their autonomy as decision makers, and to find opportunities to escape from oppressive traditional roles. Markets also promote a third, more controversial, sense of freedom in that they allow persons to interact in mutually beneficial ways even when they do not know each other or have any other traditional reason to care about the other. I call this sense of freedom “social freedom.” In each of these ways – negative, positive, and social – markets have much, and in some cases even more, to offer to women, as women have been more confined by traditional roles to a constrained family life, deprived of a fair distribution of benefits and burdens of family life, and treated as second-class citizens in their communities. While capitalism has already, as we have seen, brought great advances in the realm of negative and positive liberties, capitalism’s ability to destruct the old and create new forms of community offer a vision of freedom that is yet to be fulfilled.

I miss Diana more than I can express. The world seems a colder place without her luminous presence. To had had Diana’s friendship, to have known her personally, has been a gift beyond comparison. She brought joy and pride and a touch of glamour to my life for years. I loved and admired her without reservation. When Patrick recognized her picture on magazine covers, I thought how incredible it was that we actually knew the beautiful, famous Diana. Best of all, we knew she was even lovelier inside. I read her letters, feeling deeply touched that she continued to care for us. Seeing her in person--warm, unpretentious, and radiant--was a thrill that lasted a long, long time. It truly was, “like being brushed by angels’ wings,” as my friend at the funeral had said. Whoever would have thought when I called for a nanny so many years ago, that magic would enter my life. My family and I watched her dazzling progress from a shy teenager to a multi-faceted and charismatic woman. She fulfilled her many roles so beautifully. Yet to me, Diana was a beloved friend, not the world-famous Princess of Wales. Behind the glamour, I saw the qualities I’d always admired in her--kindness, integrity, and grace in all she did. Above all, Diana was born to be a mother. Showing affection was as natural to her as breathing. I saw her tender care for my young son. I know she was an utterly devoted mother to her own boys, giving them unconditional love and deriving her greatest joy in life from them. I’ve wished so often that her life had been a fairytale, that Diana had been spared the pain and loneliness she suffered. But without the despair, she might not have developed the strength and humanity that reached out to people everywhere. Diana instinctively looked beyond her own problems to ease the pain and distress of others. She touched so many people in her short lifetime. I never thought it would end this way--that she would die so young. I will always remember, as the last hymn faded into silence at her funeral, the solemn tread of the soldiers’ boots--so haunting, so final--as they carried her casket through the Abbey. I couldn’t bear that she was leaving forever. For months now, I’ve searched for some solace in this tragedy. I hope that Diana’s untimely death and the worldwide mourning for her have silenced forever those who belittled her values and doubted her appeal. She rests peacefully now beyond reproach--young and beautiful. Diana, you were greater than we realized. We will never, never forget you.

Weston, having been born in Chicago, was raised with typical, well-grounded, mid-western values. On his 16th birthday, his father gave him a Kodak camera with which he started what would become his lifetime vocation. During the summer of 1908, Weston met Flora May Chandler, a schoolteacher who was seven years older than he was. The following year the couple married and in time they had four sons. Weston and his family moved to Southern California and opened a portrait studio on Brand Boulevard, in the artsy section of Glendale, California, called Tropico. His artistic skills soon became apparent and he became well known for his portraits of famous people, such as Carl Sandburg and Max Eastman. In the autumn of 1913, hearing of his work, Margrethe Mather, a photographer from Los Angeles, came to his studio, where Weston asked her to be his studio assistant. It didn’t take long before the two developed a passionate, intimate relationship. Both Weston and Mather became active in the growing bohemian cultural scene in Los Angeles. She was extremely outgoing and artistic in a most flamboyant way. Her bohemian sexual values were new to Weston’s conventional thinking, but Mather excited him and presented him with a new outlook that he found enticing. Mather was beautiful, and being bisexual and having been a high-class prostitute, was delightfully worldly. Mather's uninhibited lifestyle became irresistible to Weston and her photography took him into a new and exciting art form. As Mather worked and overtly played with him, she presented a lifestyle that was in stark contrast to Weston’s conventional home life, and he soon came to see his wife Flora as a person with whom he had little in common. Weston expanded his horizons but tried to keep his affairs with other women a secret. As he immersed himself further into nude photography, it became more difficult to hide his new lifestyle from his wife. Flora became suspicious about this secret life, but apparently suffered in silence. One of the first of many women who agreed to model nude for Weston was Tina Modotti. Although Mather remained with Weston, Tina soon became his primary model and remained so for the next several years. There was an instant attraction between Tina Modotti, Mather and Edward Weston, and although he remained married, Tina became his student, model and lover. Richey soon became aware of the affair, but it didn’t seem to bother him, as they all continued to remain good friends. The relationship Tina had with Weston could definitely be considered “cheating,” since knowledge of the affair was withheld as much as possible from his wife Flora May. Perhaps his wife knew and condoned this new promiscuous relationship, since she had also endured the intense liaison with Margrethe Mather. Tina, Mather and Weston continued working together until Tina and Weston suddenly left for Mexico in 1923. As a group, they were all a part of the cozy, artsy, bohemian society of Los Angeles, which was where they were introduced to the then-fashionable, communistic philosophy.

gave up on the idea of creating “socialist men and women” who would work without monetary incentives. In a famous speech he criticized “equality mongering,” and thereafter not only did different jobs get paid different wages but also a bonus system was introduced. It is instructive to understand how this worked. Typically a firm under central planning had to meet an output target set under the plan, though such plans were often renegotiated and changed. From the 1930s, workers were paid bonuses if the output levels were attained. These could be quite high—for instance, as much as 37 percent of the wage for management or senior engineers. But paying such bonuses created all sorts of disincentives to technological change. For one thing, innovation, which took resources away from current production, risked the output targets not being met and the bonuses not being paid. For another, output targets were usually based on previous production levels. This created a huge incentive never to expand output, since this only meant having to produce more in the future, since future targets would be “ratcheted up.” Underachievement was always the best way to meet targets and get the bonus. The fact that bonuses were paid monthly also kept everyone focused on the present, while innovation is about making sacrifices today in order to have more tomorrow. Even when bonuses and incentives were effective in changing behavior, they often created other problems. Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings. By the 1940s, the leaders of the Soviet Union, even if not their admirers in the West, were well aware of these perverse incentives. The Soviet leaders acted as if they were due to technical problems, which could be fixed. For example, they moved away from paying bonuses based on output targets to allowing firms to set aside portions of profits to pay bonuses. But a “profit motive” was no more encouraging to innovation than one based on output targets. The system of prices used to calculate profits was almost completely unconnected to the value of new innovations or technology. Unlike in a market economy, prices in the Soviet Union were set by the government, and thus bore little relation to value. To more specifically create incentives for innovation, the Soviet Union introduced explicit innovation bonuses in 1946. As early as 1918, the principle had been recognized that an innovator should receive monetary rewards for his innovation, but the rewards set were small and unrelated to the value of the new technology. This changed only in 1956, when it was stipulated that the bonus should be proportional to the productivity of the innovation. However, since productivity was calculated in terms of economic benefits measured using the existing system of prices, this was again not much of an incentive to innovate. One could fill many pages with examples of the perverse incentives these schemes generated. For example, because the size of the innovation bonus fund was limited by the wage bill of a firm, this immediately reduced the incentive to produce or adopt any innovation that might have economized on labor.

How to live (forty pieces of advice I feel to be helpful but which I don’t always follow) 1. Appreciate happiness when it is there 2. Sip, don’t gulp. 3. Be gentle with yourself. Work less. Sleep more. 4. There is absolutely nothing in the past that you can change. That’s basic physics. 5. Beware of Tuesdays. And Octobers. 6. Kurt Vonnegut was right. “Reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.” 7. Listen more than you talk. 8. Don’t feel guilty about being idle. More harm is probably done to the world through work than idleness. But perfect your idleness. Make it mindful. 9. Be aware that you are breathing. 10. Wherever you are, at any moment, try to find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind. 11. Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you. 12. Go for a run. Then do some yoga. 13. Shower before noon. 14. Look at the sky. Remind yourself of the cosmos. Seek vastness at every opportunity, in order to see the smallness of yourself. 15. Be kind. 16. Understand that thoughts are thoughts. If they are unreasonable, reason with them, even if you have no reason left. You are the observer of your mind, not its victim. 17. Do not watch TV aimlessly. Do not go on social media aimlessly. Always be aware of what you are doing and why you are doing it. Don’t value TV less. Value it more. Then you will watch it less. Unchecked distractions will lead you to distraction. 18. Sit down. Lie down. Be still. Do nothing. Observe. Listen to your mind. Let it do what it does without judging it. Let it go, like Snow Queen in Frozen. 19. Don’t’ worry about things that probably won’t happen. 20. Look at trees. Be near trees. Plant trees. (Trees are great.) 21. Listen to that yoga instructor on YouTube, and “walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet”. 22. Live. Love. Let go. The three Ls. 23. Alcohol maths. Wine multiplies itself by itself. The more you have, the more you are likely to have. And if it is hard to stop at one glass, it will be impossible at three. Addition is multiplication. 24. Beware of the gap. The gap between where you are and where you want to be. Simply thinking of the gap widens it. And you end up falling through. 25. Read a book without thinking about finishing it. Just read it. Enjoy every word, sentence, and paragraph. Don’t wish for it to end, or for it to never end. 26. No drug in the universe will make you feel better, at the deepest level, than being kind to other people. 27. Listen to what Hamlet – literature’s most famous depressive – told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” 28. If someone loves you, let them. Believe in that love. Live for them, even when you feel there is no point. 29. You don’t need the world to understand you. It’s fine. Some people will never really understand things they haven’t experienced. Some will. Be grateful. 30. Jules Verne wrote of the “Living Infinite”. This is the world of love and emotion that is like a “sea”. If we can submerge ourselves in it, we find infinity in ourselves, and the space we need to survive. 31. Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life. 32. Remember that there is nothing weird about you. You are just a human, and everything you do and feel is a natural thing, because we are natural animals. You are nature. You are a hominid ape. You are in the world and the world is in you. Everything connects. 33. Don’t believe in good or bad, or winning and losing, or victory and defeat, or ups and down. At your lowest and your highest, whether you are happy or despairing or calm or angry, there is a kernel of you that stays the same. That is the you that matters.

My darling son: depression at your age is more common than you might think. I remember it very strongly in Minneapolis, Minnesota, when I was about twenty-six and felt like killing myself. I think the winter, the cold, the lack of sunshine, for us tropical creatures, is a trigger. And to tell you the truth, the idea that you might soon unpack your bags here, having chucked in all your European plans, makes your mother and me as happy as could be. You have more than earned the equivalent of any university 'degree' and you have used your time so well to educate yourself culturally and personally that if university bores you, it is only natural. Whatever you do from here on in, whether you write or don't write, whether you get a degree or not, whether you work for your mother, or at El Mundo, or at La Ines, or teaching at a high school, or giving lectures like Estanislao Zuleta, or as a psychoanalyst to your parents, sisters and relatives, or simply being Hector Abad Faciolince, will be fine. What matters is that you don't stop being what you have been up till now, a person, who simply by virtue of being the way you are, not for what you write or don't write, or for being brilliant or prominent, but just for being the way you are, has earned the affection, the respect, the acceptance, the trust, the love, of the vast majority of those who know you. So we want to keep seeing you in this way, not as a future great author, or journalist or communicator or professor or poet, but as the son, brother, relative, friend, humanist, who understands others and does not aspire to be understood. It does not matter what people think of you, and gaudy decoration doesn't matter, for those of us who know you are. For goodness' sake, dear Quinquin, how can you think 'we support you (...) because 'that boy could go far'? You have already gone very far, further than all our dreams, better than everything we imagined for any of our children. You should know very well that your mother's and my ambitions are not for glory, or for money, or even for happiness, that word that sounds so pretty but is attained so infrequently and for such short intervals (and maybe for that very reason is so valued), for all our children, but that they might at least achieve well-being, that more solid, more durable, more possible, more attainable word. We have often talked of the anguish of Carlos Castro Saavedra, Manuel Meija Vallejo, Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt, and so many quasi-geniuses we know. Or Sabato or Rulfo, or even Garcia Marquez. That does not matter. Remember Goethe: 'All theory (I would add, and all art), dear friend, is grey, but only the golden tree of life springs ever green.' What we want for you is to 'live'. And living means many better things than being famous, gaining qualifications or winning prizes. I think I too had boundless political ambitions when I was young and that's why I wasn't happy. I think I too had boundless political ambitions when I was young and that's why I wasn't happy. Only now, when all that has passed, have I felt really happy. And part of that happiness is Cecilia, you, and all my children and grandchildren. Only the memory of Marta Cecilia tarnishes it. I believe things are that simple, after having gone round and round in circles, complicating them so much. We should do away with this love for things as ethereal as fame, glory, success... Well, my Quinquin, now you know what I think of you and your future. There's no need for you to worry. You are doing just fine and you'll do better, and when you get to my age or your grandfather's age and you can enjoy the scenery around La Ines that I intend to leave to all of you, with the sunshine, heat and lush greenery, and you'll see I was right. Don't stay there longer than you feel you can. If you want to come back I'll welcome you with open arms. And if you regret it and want to go back again, we can buy you another return flight. A kiss from your father.

The weight fluctuations of famous women are tracked like stocks because their bodies are, in their line of work, their personal stock, the physical embodiment of market value.

It was music first of all that brought us together. Without being professionals or virtuosos, we were all passionate lovers of music; but Serge dreamed of devoting himself entirely to the art. All the time he was studying law along with us, he took singing lessons with Cotogni, the famous baritone of the Italian Opera; while for musical theory, which he wanted to master completely so as to rival Moussorgsky and Tchaikovsky, he went to the very source and studied with Rimsky-Korsakov. However, our musical tastes were not always the same. The quality our group valued most was what the Germans call Stimmung, and besides this, the power of suggestion and dramatic force. The Bach of the Passions, Gluck, Schubert, Wagner and the Russian composers – Borodin in ‘Prince Igor’, Rimsky and, above all, Tchaikovsky, were our gods. Tchaikovsky’s ‘Queen of Spades’ had just been performed for the first time at the Opera of St Petersburg, and we were ecstatic about its Hoffmannesque element, notably the scene in the old Countess’s bedroom. We liked the composer’s famous Romances much less, finding them insipid and sometimes trivial. These Romances, however, were just what Diaghilev liked. What he valued most was broad melody, and in particular whatever gave a singer the chance to display the sensuous qualities of his voice. During the years of his apprenticeship he bore our criticisms and jokes with resignation, but as he learned more about music – and about the history of art in general – he gained in self-confidence and found reasons to justify his predilections. There came a time when not only did he dare to withstand our attacks but went on to refute our arguments fiercely.

Putnam finds in American pragmatism “a certain group of theses which can and indeed were argued differently by different philosophers with different concerns, and which became the basis of the philosophies of Peirce, and above all James and Dewey” (Putnam 1994, p. 152). Cursorily summarized, those theses are (1) antiskepticism: pragmatists hold that doubt requires justification just as much as belief (recall Peirce’s famous distinction between “real” and “philosophical” doubt); (2) fallibilism: pragmatists hold that there is never a metaphysical guarantee to be had that such-and-such a belief will never need revision (that one can be both fallibilistic and antiskeptical is perhaps the unique insight of American pragmatism); (3) the thesis that there is no fundamental dichotomy between “facts” and “values”; and (4) the thesis that, in a certain sense, practice is primary in philosophy. (Ibid.)

Over and over again we tell you it is acceptable for men—famous, infamous, or not at all famous—to abuse women. We look the other way. We make excuses. We reward these men for their bad behavior. We tell you that, as a young woman, you have little value or place in this society. Clearly we have sent these messages with such alarming regularity and consistency we have encouraged you to willingly run toward something violent and terrible with your eyes and arms wide open.

Oh, yes, when applied correctly mighty and noble battles result! Of course I always win—the value of Prince X is a constant. It cannot be lesser than that of Monster Y—this is the Moral Superiority Hypothesis made famous five hundred years ago by my ancestor Ethelred, the Mathematician-King. We have never seen his equal, in all these centuries.