Twice Meaningful Quotes

Twice a week, I make a point not to eat anything until lunchtime, even if I am working out. I always feel incredibly energized from this mini fast.

Sorrow and profound fatigue are at the heart of Dewey's silence. It had been his ambition to learn "exactly what happened in that house that night." Twice now he'd been told, and the two versions were very much alike, the only serious discrepancy being that Hickock attributed all four deaths to Smith, while Smith contended that Hickock had killed the two women. But the confessions, though they answered questions of how and why, failed to satisfy his sense of meaningful design. The crime was a psychological accident, virtually an impersonal act; the victims might as well have been killed by lightning. Except for one thing: they had experienced prolonged terror, they had suffered. And Dewey could not forget their sufferings. Nonetheless, he found it possible to look at the man beside him without anger - with, rather, a measure of sympathy - for Perry Smith's life had been no bed of roses but pitiful, an ugly and lonely progress toward one mirage and then another. Dewey's sympathy, however, was not deep enough to accommodate either forgiveness or mercy. He hoped to see Perry and his partner hanged - hanged back to back.

We do not base botany upon the old-fashioned division into useful and useless plants, or our zoology upon the naive distinction between harmless and dangerous animals. But we still complacently assume that consciousness is sense and the unconsciousness is nonsense. In science such an assumption would be laughed out of court. Do microbes, for instance, make sense or nonsense? Whatever the unconscious may be, it is a natural phenomenon producing symbols that prove to be meaningful. We cannot expect someone who has never looked through a microscope to be an authority on microbes; in the same way, no one who has not made a serious study of natural symbols can be considered a competent judge in this matter. But the general undervaluation of the human soul is so great that neither the great religions nor the philosophies nor scientific rationalism have been willing to look at it twice.

Intellectually, he knew that he was falling sunward, heading in from the Jovian system toward the Belt. In a week, the sun would be close to twice the size it was now, and it would still be insignificant. In a context of such immensity, of distances and speeds so far above any meaningful human experience, it seemed like nothing should matter. He should be agreeing that he hadn’t been there when God made the mountains, whether it meant the ones on Earth or on Ganymede or somewhere farther out in the darkness. He was in a tiny metal-and-ceramic box that was exchanging matter for energy to throw a half dozen primates across a vacuum larger than millions of oceans. Compared to that, how could anything matter?

Years later, my father, too, would take his own meaningful walk: he had had a bad night on the drink where he fell through some bushes or something, and he talked to Debbie about it the following morning and she said, “Is this the way you want to live your life?” And he said, no—then he went for a walk and quit drinking and hasn’t had a drop since. Excuse me? You went for a walk and quit drinking? I have spent upward of $7 million trying to get sober. I have been to six thousand AA meetings. (Not an exaggeration, more an educated guess.) I’ve been to rehab fifteen times. I’ve been in a mental institution, gone to therapy twice a week for thirty years, been to death’s door. And you went for a fucking walk? I’ll tell you where you can take a walk. But my dad can’t write a play, star on Friends, help the helpless. And he doesn’t have $7 million to spend on anything. Life has its trade-offs, I suppose. This begs the question—would I trade places with him? Why don’t we get to that one later?

I like to fix motorcycles more than I like to wire houses (even though I could make about twice as much money wiring houses).9 Both practices have internal goods that engage my attention, but fixing bikes is more meaningful because not only the fixing but also the riding of motorcycles answers to certain intuitions I have about human excellence. People who ride motorcycles have gotten something right, and I want to put myself in the service of it, this thing that we do, this kingly sport that is like war made beautiful.

If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane trip. But what if there's five hours between your arrival and your connecting flight, or your plane is late arriving and you've missed your connection, or the connecting flight is late, or the staff of another airline are striking for a wage-benefit package and the government has not yet ordered out the National Guard to control this threat to international capitalism so your airline staff is trying to handle twice as many people as usual, or there are tornadoes or thunderstorms or blizzards or little important bits of the plane missing or any of the thousand other reasons (never under any circumstances the fault of the airlines, and rarely explained at the time) why those who go places on airplanes sit and sit and sit and sit in airports, not going anywhere? In this, probably its true aspect, the airport is not a prelude to travel, not a place of transition: it is a stop. A blockage. A constipation. The airport is where you can't go anywhere else. A nonplace in which time does not pass and there is no hope of any meaningful existence. A terminus: the end. The airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval between planes.

People take time. But in our haste, we size them up or cut them down to what we take to be a more manageable size, labeling people instead of trying to hear, understand or welcome them. And we love our labels as ourselves even as they don't - and can't - do justice to the complexity of our own lived lives or anyone else's. It's as if we'll do anything to avoid the burden of having to think twice. To form an opinion about someone or something is to assert - or to believe we've asserted - some kind of control. And in the rush to opine, we degrade ourselves and whatever it is we'd like to think we've spoken meaningfully about and defensively stick to hastily prepared and unconvincing scripts, as others have before us, of radical denial.

Years later my father too would take his own meaningful walk. He had a bad night on the drink where he fell through some bushes or something. And he talked to Debbie about it he following morning, and she said is this the way you want to live your life? and he said no. Then he went for a walk and quit drinking and hasn't had a drop since. Excuse me? You went for a walk? And quit drinking? I spent upward of $7 Million trying to get sober. I've been to six thousand AA meetings, not an exaggeration more an educated guess, I've been to 15 rehabs. I've been in a mental institution, gone to therapy twice a week for 30 years. Been to deaths door...and you went for a fucking walk? I'll tell you where you can take a walk. But. My dad can't write a play, star on friends, help the helpless, and he doesn't have $7 million to spend on anything. Life has it's tradeoffs I suppose.

I’m sorry,” she said, wishing she could say something more meaningful. “I’m not. If he’d been a good uncle, I’d have stayed in Boston. Never would have found my way to San Francisco,” he said. Camille knew where the rest of his story led and grinned. “And you never would have rescued my father from a pickpocket,” she added. He started to laugh, a quiet, almost personal chuckle, like he was thinking about some funny memory. Camille caught the bug of laughter and wanted to join in. “What is it?” she asked. “Your father didn’t need a rescuer. He caught the pickpocket himself,” Oscar answered, a hand on his abdomen from all his laughter. “And then he invited him inside for dinner.” Her smile fell flat. She stared at him, trying to comprehend what he’d just said. “You?” she asked, dumbfounded. “You were the pickpocket?” Oscar nodded, scratching the back of his head. “Yeah. I wasn’t very good at it.” Her father could have had him arrested or shooed him away without thinking twice. But he’d invited Oscar inside. He gave him work, food…a real chance. “Why didn’t he tell me?” she asked, feeling like she’d been duped once again. All the lies her father had woven to cover up his secrets had become so frayed, Camille wondered if she had truly known him at all. “To give me a clean slate with everyone. Even you.” Oscar moved toward her in cautious, deliberate steps. “We’re alone. We should talk.” The pantry was cramped and dismal despite the oil lamp, and Camille had a sudden urge to flee. “About what?” she asked, her ears burning. She still reeled with the knowledge that the pickpocket story hadn’t been real, just like her mother’s story hadn’t been real. Oscar stopped within a few inches from her and reached a hand around her waist. “About our night together, Camille,” he answered, his dimples forming. “There’s a lot to say.

If talking pictures could be said to have a father, it was Lee De Forest, a brilliant but erratic inventor of electrical devices of all types. (He had 216 patents.) In 1907, while searching for ways to boost telephone signals, De Forest invented something called the thermionic triode detector. De Forest’s patent described it as “a System for Amplifying Feeble Electric Currents” and it would play a pivotal role in the development of broadcast radio and much else involving the delivery of sound, but the real developments would come from others. De Forest, unfortunately, was forever distracted by business problems. Several companies he founded went bankrupt, twice he was swindled by his backers, and constantly he was in court fighting over money or patents. For these reasons, he didn’t follow through on his invention. Meanwhile, other hopeful inventors demonstrated various sound-and-image systems—Cinematophone, Cameraphone, Synchroscope—but in every case the only really original thing about them was their name. All produced sounds that were faint or muddy, or required impossibly perfect timing on the part of the projectionist. Getting a projector and sound system to run in perfect tandem was basically impossible. Moving pictures were filmed with hand-cranked cameras, which introduced a slight variability in speed that no sound system could adjust to. Projectionists also commonly repaired damaged film by cutting out a few frames and resplicing what remained, which clearly would throw out any recording. Even perfect film sometimes skipped or momentarily stuttered in the projector. All these things confounded synchronization. De Forest came up with the idea of imprinting the sound directly onto the film. That meant that no matter what happened with the film, sound and image would always be perfectly aligned. Failing to find backers in America, he moved to Berlin in the early 1920s and there developed a system that he called Phonofilm. De Forest made his first Phonofilm movie in 1921 and by 1923 he was back in America giving public demonstrations. He filmed Calvin Coolidge making a speech, Eddie Cantor singing, George Bernard Shaw pontificating, and DeWolf Hopper reciting “Casey at the Bat.” By any measure, these were the first talking pictures. However, no Hollywood studio would invest in them. The sound quality still wasn’t ideal, and the recording system couldn’t quite cope with multiple voices and movement of a type necessary for any meaningful dramatic presentation. One invention De Forest couldn’t make use of was his own triode detector tube, because the patents now resided with Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T. Western Electric had been using the triode to develop public address systems for conveying speeches to large crowds or announcements to fans at baseball stadiums and the like. But in the 1920s it occurred to some forgotten engineer at the company that the triode detector could be used to project sound in theaters as well. The upshot was that in 1925 Warner Bros. bought the system from Western Electric and dubbed it Vitaphone. By the time of The Jazz Singer, it had already featured in theatrical presentations several times. Indeed, the Roxy on its opening night in March 1927 played a Vitaphone feature of songs from Carmen sung by Giovanni Martinelli. “His voice burst from the screen with splendid synchronization with the movements of his lips,” marveled the critic Mordaunt Hall in the Times. “It rang through the great theatre as if he had himself been on the stage.

We have a crisis in this nation, and it has nothing to do with regulatory reform or marginal tax rates. This book is not going to be about politics. (Sorry to disappoint.) It’s about something deeper and more meaningful. Something a little harder to quantify but a lot more personal. Despite the astonishing medical advances and technological leaps of recent years, average life span is in decline in America for the third year in a row. This is the first time our nation has had even a two-year drop in life expectancy since 1962—when the cause was an influenza epidemic. Normally, declines in life expectancy are due to something big like that—a war, or the return of a dormant disease. But what’s the “big thing” going on in America now? What’s killing all these people? The 2016 data point to three culprits: Alzheimer’s, suicides, and unintentional injuries—a category that includes drug and alcohol–related deaths. Two years ago, 63,632 people died of overdoses. That’s 11,000 more than the previous year, and it’s more than the number of Americans killed during the entire twenty-year Vietnam War. It’s almost twice the number killed in automobile accidents annually, which had been the leading American killer for decades. In 2016, there were 45,000 suicides, a thirty-year high—and the sobering climb shows no signs of abating: the percentage of young people hospitalized for suicidal thoughts and actions has doubled over the past decade.1 We’re killing ourselves, both on purpose and accidentally. These aren’t deaths from famine, or poverty, or war. We’re literally dying of despair.

Right,” he said, “As you well know, humans are biologically programmed to sleep twice a day—a siesta in the afternoon, then eight hours of sleep at night.” She nodded. “Except most of us skip the siesta because our jobs demand it. And when I say most of us, I really just mean Americans. Mexico doesn’t have this problem, nor does France or Italy or any of those other countries that drink even more than we do at lunch. Still, the fact remains: human productivity naturally drops in the afternoon. In TV, this is referred to as the Afternoon Depression Zone. Too late to get anything meaningful done; too early to go home. Doesn’t matter if you’re a homemaker, a fourth grader, a bricklayer, a businessman—no one is immune. Between the hours of one thirty-one and four forty-four p.m., productive life as we know it ceases to exist. It’s a virtual death zone.” Elizabeth raised an eyebrow. “And although I said it affects everyone,” he continued, “it’s an especially dangerous time for the homemaker. Because unlike a fourth grader who can put off her homework, or a businessman who can pretend to be listening, the homemaker must force herself to keep going. She has to get the kids down for a nap because if she doesn’t, the evening will be hell. She has to mop the floor because if she doesn’t, someone could slip on the spilled milk. She has to run to the store because if she doesn’t, there will be nothing to eat. By the way,” he said, pausing, “have you ever noticed how women always say they need to run to the store? Not walk, not go, not stop by. Run. That’s what I mean. The homemaker is operating at an insane level of hyperproductivity. And even though she’s in way over her head, she still has to make dinner. It’s not sustainable, Elizabeth. She’s going to have a heart attack or a stroke, or at the very least be in a foul mood. And it’s all because she can’t procrastinate like her fourth grader or pretend to be doing something like her husband. She’s forced to be productive despite the fact that she’s in a potentially fatal time zone—the Afternoon Depression Zone.” “It’s classic neurogenic deprivation,” Elizabeth said, nodding.

In addition, participants were entirely unaware that their performance was being affected by their own future perceptions, suggesting that unconscious nervous system activity may be used to detect precognitive perceptions. Studies relying on unconscious responses may be more effective than those relying on conscious responses by bypassing psychological defense mechanisms that may filter out psi perceptions from ordinary awareness.8 Future Feelings In a recent series of experiments conducted in our laboratory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, we’ve explored unconscious nervous system responses to future events. Strictly speaking, such responses are a subset of precognition known as “presentiment,” a vague sense or feeling of something about to occur but without any conscious awareness of a particular event.9 The unconscious responses studied in our experiments took advantage of a well-known psychophysical reflex known as the “orienting response,” first described by Pavlov in the 1920s. The orienting response is a set of physiological changes experienced by an organism when it faces a “fight or flight” situation. For human beings, the response also appears in less dangerous contexts, such as when confronting a novel or unexpected stimulus. The classical orienting response is a series of simultaneous bodily changes that include dilation of the pupil, altered brain waves, a rise in sweat gland activity, a rise/fall pattern in heart rate, and blanching of the extremities.10 These bodily changes momentarily sharpen our perceptions, improve our decision-making abilities, increase our strength, and reduce the danger of bleeding. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective because when our ancestors were challenged by a tiger, the ones who survived were suddenly able to see and hear exceptionally well, make very fast decisions, become unusually strong, and not bleed as easily as usual. It’s relatively easy to produce an orienting response on demand by showing a person an emotionally provocative photograph. Stimuli like noxious odors, meaningful words, electrical shocks, and sudden tactile stimuli are also effective. Because a person’s general level of arousal is affected cumulatively by successive stimuli, the strength of the orienting response tends to diminish after three to five emotional pictures in a row. In our study, to prevent participants from “habituating,” we randomly interspersed the photos used to produce the orienting responses within a pool of twice as many calm photos.

This “schizoid” collective brain cannot act, only react blindly and in misaligned ways to a barrage of stimuli, mostly out of fear and anger. That’s bad news for sustained refusal. While it may seem at first like refusal is a reaction, the decision to actually refuse—not once, not twice, but perpetually until things have changed—means the development of and adherence to individual and collective commitments from which our actions proceed. In the history of activism, even things that seemed like reactions were often planned actions. For example, as William T. Martin Riches reminds us in his accounting of the Montgomery bus boycott, Rosa Parks was “acting, not reacting” when she refused to get up from her seat. She was already involved with activist organizations, having been trained at the Highlander Folk School, which produced many important figures in the movement.40 The actual play-by-play of the bus boycott is a reminder that meaningful acts of refusal have come not directly from fear, anger, and hysteria, but rather from the clarity and attention that makes organizing possible.

He reached out to cup her elbow. Best to move slowly, to communicate that she could refuse him. The choice was hers. Her luminous eyes remained fixed on his. Her lips parted as he trailed his hand from the point of her elbow to her wrist. God. Her bare skin, that small, vulnerable patch exposed between cuff and glove, was indescribably soft. His thumb rubbed her pulse once, twice. A small noise came from her, the loosening of her breath, a sound as meaningful as the shushing of silk as a dress fell to the floor. This was how it began: how a woman came undone.

Years later my father too would take his own meaningful walk. He had a bad night on the drink where he fell through some bushes or something. And he talked to Debbie about it he following morning, and she said is this the way you want to live your life? and he said no. Then he went for a walk and quit drinking and hasn't had a drop since. Excuse me? You went for a walk? And quit drinking? I spent upward of $7 Million trying to get sober. I've been to six thousand AA meetings, not an exaggeration more an educated guess, I've been to 15 rehabs. I've been in a mental institution, gone to therapy twice a week for 30 years. Been to deaths door...and you went for a fucking walk? I'll tell you where you can take a walk. But. My dad can't write a play, star on friends, help the helpless, and he doesn't have $7 million to spend on anything. Life has it's tradeoffs I suppose.

Research also shows that a less stressful life doesn’t make people nearly as happy as they think it will. Although most people predict they would be happier if they were less busy, the opposite turns out to be true. People are happier when they are busier, even when forced to take on more than they would choose. A dramatic decrease in busyness may explain why retirement can increase the risk of developing depression by 40 percent. A lack of meaningful stress may even be bad for your health. In one large epidemiological study, middle-aged men who reported higher levels of boredom were more than twice as likely to die of a heart attack over the next twenty years. In contrast, many studies show that people who have a sense of purpose live longer. For example, in a study that followed over nine thousand adults in the U.K. for ten years, those who reported highly meaningful lives had a 30 percent reduction in mortality. This reduced risk held even after controlling for factors including education, wealth, depression, and health behaviors such as smoking, exercise, and drinking.

Reflection • Pause once or twice a day to really see something ordinary and allow the miracle—the object of wonder—to appear. • Do this for a few days. What do you notice about your sense of wonder? What difference does this make for you?

Your uncle hits your aunt?” I asked. “Does she hit him back?” “No, of course not,” Grandpa interrupted, “and that’s why he hits her again. If she’d haul off and knock him over the outhouse once or twice, he’d learn better. Mike Webster was behind the door when the brains were passed out, but he could remember a lump on the skull if you gave him one that was big enough.” Mama was signaling me with her eyebrows, but I ignored her. “Why does your uncle Mike hit his wife?” I asked Hank. Hank stuffed a large piece of meat in his mouth and chewed. I waited. “Well?” I asked, unable to contain my impatience. “Rachel,” Mama said, warning me, her hands fluttering. “He hits her because he hits everybody,” Hank said finally. “She ought to hit him back,” I said. “Hard.” Mama raised her gaze to the ceiling. “That wouldn’t solve anything, Rachel. She’d be as bad as he is, then.” Grandpa and I exchanged a meaningful glance. We weren’t passive sufferers like Mama. “If I hit him, it would solve things,” I said, and Grandpa shouted with laughter. “That’s the Chance in you talking,” he said, delighted.