[Image: “…and the Light Was Good, and So Was the Dark,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (last stanza):

In the Winter of My Thirty-Eighth Year

It sounds unconvincing to say When I was young
Though I have long wondered what it would be like
To be me now
No older at all it seems from here
As far from myself as ever

Walking in fog and rain and seeing nothing
I imagine all the clocks have died in the night
Now no one is looking I could choose my age
It would be younger I suppose so I am older
It is there at hand I could take it
Except for the things I think I would do differently
They keep coming between they are what I am
They have taught me little I did not know when I was young

There is nothing wrong with my age now probably
It is how I have come to it
Like a thing I kept putting off as I did my youth

There is nothing the matter with speech
Just because it lent itself
To my uses

Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars
It is my emptiness among them
While they drift farther away in the invisible morning

(W.S. Merwin [source])

…and:

Sometimes I think the people to feel the saddest for are people who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder — people who closed the door that leads us into the secret world — or who had the doors closed for them by time and neglect and decisions made in times of weakness.

(Douglas Coupland [source])

…and:

One day Chuang Tzu and a friend were walking by a river. “Look at the fish swimming about,” said Chuang Tzu, “They are really enjoying themselves.”

“You are not a fish,” replied the friend, “So you can’t truly know that they are enjoying themselves.”

“You are not me,” said Chuang Tzu. “So how do you know that I do not know that the fish are enjoying themselves?”

([source, among many others citing the same story])

Not from whiskey river’s commonplace book:

The lecture was a refresher about the core goals of activism, “which you should repeat to yourself every morning,” he instructed the attendees as he sought an eraser in the chalk tray. He was thin as a spindle, with an academic’s disregard for his wavy chocolate-colored hair. “It doesn’t matter how well you know the rules; catechism must be repeated to be internalized.” I wrote them down, right into [the library book I was translating].

Core Goals of Activism

1. Win meaningful victories
2. Build movements that don’t recapitulate the power structures we seek to challenge
3. Create effective political alliances
4. Inspire hope and action

Contemplating his scholar-chic nonchalance and the trouser tapering around his derriere, I, for one, felt inspired to take action.

In retrospect I think how silly I was to fall in love with the workers’ politics of a skinny college boy who had never worked a day in his life, but I forgive other hot-blooded students the same. If young people didn’t go around falling in love with this or that, willing to throw their bodies before the cannon, the whole world would have burned down long ago.

(Juliet Grames [source])

…and:

As a species, we hold tightly to our intuitions, and we tend to believe them. But recent centuries of science have taught us that most assumptions we typically make about the material universe are founded upon misconceptions. This is among the most important lessons of human history: we must never ignore facts, but when we try to interpret them we must beware, for common sense is a thoroughly unreliable guide to the workings of the natural world. No matter how strong an intuition may be, we must be prepared to let it go.

(Matt Strassler [source])