A work of art often remains important to us throughout life not because of any intrinsic worth, but simply because we came upon it precisely in the moment when it could be of the greatest value to us.
Surely we should give others second chances, but there is no reason why we should we give a second chance to someone who has never given us a first chance.
We are at our happiest when we agree with Leibniz, who thought that life’s suffering are as essential to its beauty as dissonance is essential to the beauty of music. But there is something coldly indifferent to the misfortunes of others in this sort of happiness.
It is often better to have thought through something for oneself and made a honest mistake than to have succeeded simply because you followed orders without thinking. Modern society, with its perpetually growing complexity, requires ever more of the latter, but the depth of our character and intellect depends almost exclusively on the former.
To know a man, you need only find out how he envisions the story of Stagger Lee.
It is a great injustice when we meet a woman only once and become infatuated with her: we have lost the chance to learn enough about her to be glad that we will never see her again.
We measure the accuracy of others’ opinions by their consonance with our own.
A country where people do not wait in line in orderly fashion, or where the drivers do not stay in their lanes, is usually a country with serious economic and political problems.1
If you like that passage, I recommend reading all of Arnold Kling’s discussion of Tyler Cowen’s new book, Create Your Own Economy. Tyler’s book, from which the passage is excerpted, looks like it will be fascinating.
One thing I will say: I dislike the use of the word, “autistic,” as a metaphor for a person guided more strongly by abstractions than emotions centered on persons and social groups. I am certainly among the most guilty of extending the use of psychopathological terms to daily life experiences. And I understand that we must often use these terms because we unfortunately lack the proper vocabulary at present — really, we lack the entire ontology of interpersonal differences — to express the ideas that drive us to rip terms from psychopathology out of their proper context. Yet surely the people of Germany are not such exemplars of autistic personalities as they might be made out to be.
Moreover, it is unclear to me how much of the relevant variance being attributed to “autistic” personalities is merely variance in the expression of levels of the Big Five factor of conscientiousness.
Is it just me or does the Dock respond much more smoothly under 10.5.7 than under 10.5.6?
The heaviest weight. — What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, “Do you want this again and innumerable times again?” would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?1
A friend mentioned the Eternal Recurrence today, and so I reread this passage. It still strikes me as the greatest question of conscience imaginable and the truest test of happiness I know.