Eric Linder > Recent Status Updates

“The world never tires of dimming the bright and blunting the sharp, I said. It’s good to avoid suffering when one can.

So you play a dumb version of yourself, he said. Are you suffering any less?”

..

“But you, I said, you suffer more because you insist on being bright and sharp.

I suffer more because you want to do what the world does, to dim the bright and to blunt the sharp.”

This book is a whirlwind. I’m very grateful to Andrea Oppo for gifting me a copy to read and I am unpacking Shestov’s thought slowly… Shestov is so peculiar and unorthodox, every time I pick up my pen to actively recall and summarize the last five pages I just read, I imagine him wincing, impatiently waiting to explain his philosophy to me again and again.

Some great tools and frameworks. Almost 4 stars because the author is so sincere. When productivity is pushed to the extreme, any potential for life to be lived with a sense of play (fun and joy), power (feeling empowered and confident), and meaningful relationships (people) are drained out because our cups are too full.

Shestov was, in his own words, making his last attempt to put “time” back
on its right track in this work, seeing the “laws of the world” as still intact and
traditional morality as still valid. It was the Nietzschean transvaluation of all
values that would soon radically modify his previous
notions.

“He felt deeply the fallacy of ideals and disenchantment of
time: in fact, he borrowed Shakespeare’s words “The time is out of joint” as
his lifelong motto, as if something were irreparably broken within the laws of
nature and morality, and nobody could ever fix it. From then on, the only prob-
lem for Shestov would be how to deal with this irreversible and unsolvable fact.”

Notes: Unblock Method and Affective Labeling

“ I want to encourage you in your pain so that you will completely experience it in all its fullness, because as the experience of a new intensity it is a great life experience and leads everything back again to life, like everything that reaches a certain degree of greatest strength.”

“Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand already quite near its transformation.”

“We must accept existence as far as ever it is possible. Everything, even the most unheard of things, must be possible in it. That is in fact the only kind of courage that is demanded of us—to be courageous in face of the strangest, the most astounding and the most inexplicable thing that can confront us. The fact that mankind has been cowardly in this sense has done infinite harm to life,”

Reminder to myself: Return to Chapter 15: Life Stories later on.

“Above, there is also an infinite space. I look into the immensity of sky and try to forget about the immensity below, and I really do forget it. The immensity below repels and frightens me; the immensity above attracts and strengthens me.”

“To watch her sister was not like watching a saint; it was like watching the clear flowing stream the Saint was filled with, water that talked, laughed, carried, lifted, and never once uttered an impatient sound.”

“The things she wanted the baby to know seemed small, so small. How it felt to go to a grocery store on vacation; to wake at three a.m. and run your whole life through your fingertips; a toe going numb for two months because you wore borrowed shoes to a friend’s wedding; driver’s license picture where you look like a killer; playing house in the refrigerator box; hamburger wrappers on a road trip.” (Partial)

“and forced him to go in search of the lost charm, the “treasure hard to attain,” thus making him the mythical hero, the higher personality who is an expression of the self.”

“Often the old man in fairytales asks questions like who? Why? Whence? And whither? for the purpose of inducing def-reflection and mobilizing the moral forces and more often still he gives the necessary magical talisman, the unexpected and improbable power to succeed, which is one of the peculiarities of the unified personality in good or bad alike.”

“Each letter in Kate’s handwriting looks like a fat little happy man” (50).

I urge you to find a way to immerse yourself fully in the life that you’ve been given. To stop running from whatever you’re trying to escape and instead to stop, and turn, and face whatever it is. Then I dare you to walk toward it. In this way, the world may reveal itself to you as something magical and awe-inspiring that does not require escape. Instead, the world may become something worth paying attention to.

“inside a secular worldview, suffering has little to no meaning. If happiness is the meaning of life, at best, suffering is an interruption to the real goal of living, if not-in the case we can’t “fix,” like death or disease - a permanent obstacle.”

Calvin recognized that the people who are closest to us, as Whitman said, “contain multitudes.” He lived his life paying close attention to the women he loved. As other writers travel far and wide for inspiration, Calvin received his inspiration while eating breakfast and arguing with Alice. There is infinite value that being present possesses in our world that’s becoming more distracted and noisy by the day.

“I used to think that poetry - and religion, too - was about describing the transcendent; the things you couldn’t put your hands on. But these days, I find myself more and more interested in language that pays attention to tangible things. Poems that try to be about everything often end up being about nothing, but poems that pay attention to one thing can have much more to say.”

“Where fear is ever present you will never tire of pleasure in the relationship. It sounds brutal, but Stendhal is right. Life is brutal. I am living dangerously when I take a relationship for granted. Most people think climbing Everest is very risky, but things usually work out. However, taking reciprocal love for granted – I would never dare do that.”