Monthly Archives: August 2017

Charles Bukowski

I never type in the morning. I don’t get up in the morning. I drink at night. I try to stay in bed until twelve o’clock, that’s noon. Usually, if I have to get up earlier, I don’t feel good all day. I look, if it says twelve, then I get up and my day begins. I eat something, and then I usually run right up to the race track after I wake up. I bet the horses, then I come back and Linda cooks something and we talk awhile, we eat, and we have a few drinks, and then I go upstairs with a couple of bottles and I type — starting around nine-thirty and going until one-thirty, to, two-thirty at night. And that’s it.

Charles Bukowski, Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters 1963–1993, Northville, 2003, p. 78

Kevin Dutton

The psychopath, it’s been said, gets the words, but not the music, of emotion. […]

Joe was twenty-eight, better looking than Brad Pitt, and had an IQ of 160. Why he’d felt the need to beat that girl senseless in the parking lot, drive her to the darkness on the age of that northern town, rape her repeatedly at knifepoint, and then slit her throat and toss her facedown in that Dumpster in a deserted industrial park is beyond comprehension. Parts of her anatomy were later found in his glove compartment.

In a soulless, airless interview suite smelling faintly of antiseptic, I sat across a table from Joe—a million miles, and five years, on from his municipal, blue-collar killing field. I was interested in the way he made decision, the stochastic settings on his brain’s moral compass—and I had a secret weapon, a fiendish psychological trick up my sleep, to find out. I posed him the following dilemma:

A brilliant transplant surgeon has five patients. Each of the patients is in need of a different organ, and each of them will die without that organ. Unfortunately, there are no organs currently available to perform any of the transplants. A healthy young traveler, just passing through, comes into the doctor’s office for a routine checkup. While performing the checkup, the doctor discovers that the young man’s organs are compatible with all five of his dying patients. Suppose, further, that were the young man to disappear, no one would suspect the doctor. Would the doctor be right to kill the young man to save his five patients? […]

“I can see where the problem lies,” he commented matter-of-factly when I put it to him. “If all you’re doing is simply playing the numbers game, it’s a fucking no-brainer, isn’t it? You kill the guy, and save the other five. It’s utilitarianism on crack… […] If I was the doctor, I wouldn’t give it a second thought. It’s five for the price of one, isn’t it?”

Kevin Dutton, The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success, New York, 2012, pp. 48-49

Maria Popova

We’ve created a culture that fetishizes the new(s), and we forget the wealth of human knowledge, wisdom, and transcendence that lives in the annals of what we call “history” – art, literature, philosophy, and so many things that are both timeless and incredibly timely.

Our presentism bias – anchored in the belief that if it isn’t at the top of Google, it doesn’t matter, and if it isn’t Googleable at all, it doesn’t exist – perpetuates our arrogance that no one has ever grappled with the issues we’re grappling with. Which of course is tragically untrue.

Maria Popova, quoted in Kelton Reid, ‘Here’s How Maria Popova of Brain Pickings Writes’, coplyblogger, August 7, 2013

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Les grandes personnes aiment les chiffres. Quand vous leur parlez d’un nouvel ami, ells ne vous questionnent jamais sur l’essentiel. Elles ne vous dissent jamais : « Quel est le son de sa voix ? Quels sont les jeux qu’il préfère ? Est-ce qu’il collectionne les papillons ? » Elles vous demandent : « Quel âge a-t-il ? Combien a-t-il de frères ? Combien pèse-t-il ? Combien gagne son père ? »

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le petit prince, Paris, 1943, ch. 4

Edward Gibbon

The relation of a brother and a sister, especially if they do not marry, appears to me of a very singular nature. It is a familiar and tender friendship with a female, much about our own age; an affection perhaps softened by the secret influence of sex, but pure from any mixture of sensual desire, the sole species of platonic love that can be indulged with truth, and without danger.

Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life and Writings, London, 1796