• Book title: The Notebook
• Author: Roland Allen
• Rating: 6/5

This book was written for me, and I am utterly convinced of it. It’s an absolute gem. For anyone who loves stationery as much as I do, this is a must-read. I even quoted it at length in my Paper Pro review.

Notes & Highlights

It even accorded with the classic principles of Italian design: like an espresso, a pair of Persol sunglasses or a Prada dress, le moleskine was minimal, functional and assertively black.

I prefer Leuchtturm1917 notebooks, though.

The oldest item that looks to modern eyes like a notebook sits in a display case in a castle in a Turkish city, [...]

The wreck is the oldest shipwreck yet excavated: it went down in about 1305 BCE, and its other contents confirm that we inherit the diptych from a sophisticated trading network.

Cai Lun, a Han dynasty eunuch, is said to have been responsible for the invention of paper, discovering that pulp vegetable fibres drained over a fine mesh dried into a durable, versatile and affordable material.

What makes the Farolfi ledger a key document in European history – indeed, world history – is that this wreck of a notebook is the first place where we see all the abstract concepts of accountancy, and the practical techniques by which they were managed, used at once.

Wandering around the Tuscan countryside with a merchant’s ledger and an ink bottle, young Cimabue invented the sketchbook.

What did people write in their zibaldoni? In a word: everything. Poems in Latin, poems in Tuscan, prayers, excerpts from books, songs, recipes, lists, you name it.

So notebooks democratised literature by giving readers another way to read; but they also gave writers another way to write.

English readers first learn of Boccaccio when they study Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, six of which draw heavily on stories in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Chaucer’s Clerk, Franklin, Merchant, Pardoner, Reeve and Shipman all retell stories familiar to the Tuscan’s readers, and the works’ shared structure – tales told by a disparate group thrown temporarily together – is obvious. But in an age before print, how could an Englishman have come to plagiarise a collection of stories written only a few years before in the local dialect of a town a thousand miles from his own? And what can this connection tell us about the way notebooks moved outward from Tuscany, and across Europe?

Bon vin, belle Dames et bonne viande, Pendu soyt il qui plus demande

Good wine, fair ladies, and good meat — hanged be he who asks for more.

As the voyage progressed, Darwin became more aware of the value of his field notes and he started writing at greater length. ‘Let the collector’s motto be “Trust nothing to the memory”,’ he would later write, ‘for the memory becomes a fickle guardian when one interesting object is succeeded by another still more interesting

The results were dramatic: Pennebaker’s study revealed that those people he’d asked to write about trauma went to the doctor at about half the rate of people in the control group, who’d written about routine matters. They used less aspirin, too. The correlation, he would later write, was ‘exceptionally powerful’, and unambiguous: ‘when people write about upsetting experiences it has a positive health effect upon them.’

Long practice teaches an artist to direct their gaze in an unusually focused way; it trains them to repurpose areas of their brain; and it changes the very structure of the brain’s neural networks.

In 2021, a Japanese study compared how effectively we take (non-academic) notes on paper, a phone, or a tablet. Pen and paper proved the most efficient by far: not only did subjects complete the note-taking task more quickly, they later had much better recall of the details

You could file calculators, slide rules and computers alongside the pen and paper, or any device that enables us to think in ways which our brains alone are not up to. Such things have usually been considered to be external aids to thought, supports which allow the neurons firing around our brains to do their thing: but for Clark this didn’t ring true. Certain kinds of thought – writing a novel, multiplying ten-digit numbers together, calculating a planet’s orbit – only became possible with these external tools and, that being the case, surely those indispensable things should share the credit with the brain?

Where to buy The Notebook by Roland Allen:

• Bookshop.org
• Amazon

• Book title: Things Become Other Things
• Author: Craig Mod
• Rating: 6/5

As I've said in my review of the original, fine-arts version: Craig writes, I read. This is law. And this version of the book is better. Expanded, more details, better prose. If you want to read one version, make it this one.

Where to buy Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod:

• Bookshop
• Amazon

• Book title: Meditations for Mortals
• Author: Oliver Burkeman
• Rating: 3/5

I read the whole book in two days instead of the 28-day pace the author suggests. It’s fine. A few good quotes in there. I’ll probably use some bits in a future blog post.

Notes & Highlights

Almost nobody wants to hear the real answer to the question of how to spend more of your finite time doing things that matter to you, which involves no system. The answer is: you just do them. You pick something you genuinely care about, and then, for at least a few minutes – a quarter of an hour, say – you do some of it. Today. It really is that simple. Unfortunately, for many of us, it also turns out to be one of the hardest things in the world.

The truth, though it often makes people indignant to hear it, is that it’s almost never literally the case that you have to meet a work deadline, honour a commitment, answer an email, fulfil a family obligation, or anything else. The astounding reality – in the words of Sheldon B. Kopp, a genial and brilliant American psychotherapist who died in 1999 – is that you’re pretty much free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.

People today are in danger of drowning in information; but, because they have been taught that information is useful, they are more willing to drown than they need be.’ – IDRIES SHAH

Almost everything that happens, according to an adage of uncertain origin, is either a good time or a good story.

[...] from the essayist Anne Lamott: Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together. They are much more like you than you would believe. So try not to compare your insides to their outsides.

But the relationship between the two kinds of ‘impossible’ is actually an inverse one. In other words, the more willing you are wholeheartedly to acknowledge the hard limitations of human finitude, the easier it gets to do what others might dismiss as impossible. Once you stop struggling to get on top of everything, to stay in absolute control, or to make everything perfect, you’re rewarded with the time, energy and psychological freedom to accomplish the most of which anyone could be capable.

‘There was the cat, asleep. He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly stirred the sugar, sipped it (this pleasure had been denied him in the clinic), and thought, as he smoothed the cat’s black coat, that this contact was an illusion and that the two beings, man and cat, were as good as separated by a glass, for man lives in time, in succession, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant.’ – JORGE LUIS BORGES

Where to buy Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman:

• Bookshop
• Amazon

• Book title: Awareness
• Author: Anthony de Mello
• Rating: 3.5/5

This book didn’t hit me the way I thought it would, based on what others said. It’s solid and might shift your perspective on the world. It just didn’t for me. Maybe because I already agree with most of what it says.

Notes & Highlights

Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.

All they want you to do is to mend their broken toys. “Give me back my wife. Give me back my job. Give me back my money. Give me back my reputation, my success.” This is what they want; they want their toys replaced.

We don’t want to be unconditionally happy. I’m ready to be happy provided I have this and that and the other thing.

What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you. You are always a slave to what you’re not aware of. When you’re aware of it, you’re free from it. It’s there, but you’re not affected by it. You’re not controlled by it; you’re not enslaved by it. That’s the difference.

Nobody was mean to you. Somebody was mean to what he or she thought was you, but not to you. Nobody ever rejects you; they’re only rejecting what they think you are. But that cuts both ways. Nobody ever accepts you either. Until people come awake, they are simply accepting or rejecting their image of you.

Another illusion is that external events have the power to hurt you, that other people have the power to hurt you. They don’t. It’s you who give this power to them.

Another illusion: You are all those labels that people have put on you, or that you have put on yourself. You’re not, you’re not! So you don’t have to cling to them. The day that somebody tells me I’m a genius and I take that seriously, I’m in big trouble. Can you understand why? Because now I’m going to start getting tense. I’ve got to live up to it, I’ve got to maintain it.

That is why it is so difficult to translate from one language to another, because each language cuts reality up differently.

Every language has untranslatable words and expressions, because we’re cutting reality up and adding something or subtracting something and usage keeps changing. Reality is a whole and we cut it up to make concepts and we use words to indicate different parts.

As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life. But life has no meaning; it cannot have meaning because meaning is a formula; meaning is something that makes sense to the mind. Every time you make sense out of reality, you bump into something that destroys the sense you made. Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.

Where to buy Awareness by Anthony de Mello:

• Bookshop
• Amazon

• Book title: The Denial of Death
• Author: Ernest Becker
• Rating: 2.5/5

I find this book weird. I read through it all, and at the end of it, I still don't know the point of it. I don't think there is anything that I got out of it? Also, Freud was a weirdo.

Notes & Highlights

Beyond a given point man is not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way.

Where to buy The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker:

• Bookshop
• Amazon

• Book title: Pilgrim At Tinker Creek
• Author: Annie Dillard
• Rating: 3.5/5

I understand why this book won a Pulitzer Prize. But I can't give it more than 3.5 stars, because Dillard writes way too much about insects, and holy shit I hate insects.

Notes & Highlights

Michael Goldman wrote in a poem, “When the Muse comes She doesn’t tell you to write; / She says get up for a minute, I’ve something to show you, stand here.”

Where to buy Pilgrim At Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard:

• Bookshop
• Amazon

• Book title: The City and Its Uncertain Walls
• Author: Haruki Murakami
• Rating: 3.5/5

I have to admit, this book confused me up until the end, then I understood what it was all about, and I think... it's fine. Not Murakami's best book, but a decent book regardless.

Notes & Highlights

However—there isn’t just one reality. Reality is something you have to choose by yourself, out of several possible alternatives.

Where to buy The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami:

• Bookshop.org

• Book title: A Man's Search for Meaning
• Author: Viktor Frankl
• Rating: 4.5/5

This was a re-read. I think I first read this book a couple of years ago, and back then it hit differently than it does today. I believe I've found my meaning in life by now, so it has less of an impact. Still, it remains a fantastic book, though.

Notes & Highlights

You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.

“Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.

Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning

The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.

To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.

Logotherapy bases its technique called “paradoxical intention” on the twofold fact that fear brings about that which one is afraid of, and that hyper-intention makes impossible what one wishes.

The fear of sleeplessness results in a hyper-intention to fall asleep, which, in turn, incapacitates the patient to do so. To overcome this particular fear, I usually advise the patient not to try to sleep but rather to try to do just the opposite, that is, to stay awake as long as possible. In other words, the hyper-intention to fall asleep, arising from the anticipatory anxiety of not being able to do so, must be replaced by the paradoxical intention not to fall asleep, which soon will be followed by sleep.

The truth is that man does not live by welfare alone.

Where to buy A Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl:

• Bookshop
• Amazon

• Book title: More Than Words
• Author: John Warner
• Rating: 5/5

I've been thinking a lot about writing in the age of Generative AI, and I found this book overlaps a lot with how I see things. AI doesn't think, and AI doesn't feel. So what it outputs cannot be considered writing.

Notes & Highlights

Ten days after ChatGPT’s arrival, writing at the Atlantic, veteran high school English teacher Daniel Herman declared ChatGPT meant “the end of high school English.”

No person or company appears to be making significant revenue from a generative AI–enabled or –enhanced application. The AI gold rush is primarily confined to speculative investment in companies that are promising something big in the future.

It is frankly bizarre to me that many people find the outsourcing of their own humanity to AI attractive. It is akin to promising to automate our most intimate and meaningful experiences, like outsourcing the love you have for your family because going through the hassle of the times your loved ones try your spirit isn’t worth the trouble.

Because ChatGPT cannot write. Generating syntax is not the same thing as writing. Writing is an embodied act of thinking and feeling. Writing is communicating with intention. Yes, the existence of a product at the end of the process is an indicator that writing has happened, but by itself, it does not define what writing is or what it means to the writer or the audience for that writing.

In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.

What ChatGPT and other large language models are doing is not writing and shouldn’t be considered as such.
Writing is thinking. Writing involves both the expression and exploration of an idea, meaning that even as we’re trying to capture the idea on the page, the idea may change based on our attempts to capture it. Removing thinking from writing renders an act not writing.
Writing is also feeling, a way for us to be invested and involved not only in our own lives but the lives of others and the world around us.
Reading and writing are inextricable, and outsourcing our reading to AI is essentially a choice to give up on being human.
If ChatGPT can produce an acceptable example of something, that thing is not worth doing by humans and quite probably isn’t worth doing at all.
Deep down, I believe that ChatGPT by itself cannot kill anything worth preserving. My concern is that out of convenience, or expedience, or through carelessness, we may allow these meaningful things to be lost or reduced to the province of a select few rather than being accessible to all.

Generative AI does not “review” anything. It has no capacity for consideration. It has no taste or worldview.

Generative AI does not “remember” anything. While it does have the capacity to fit future prompts to past responses as part of a chain, it is not working from memory rooted in experience as we understand it in humans.

Generative AI is not doing what Menand does when writing a poem. It has no capacity for working from intention in the way humans do as they write.

Large language models do not “write.” They generate syntax. They do not think, feel, or experience anything. They are fundamentally incapable of judging truth, accuracy, or veracity. Any actions that look like the exercise of judgment are illusory.

Bjarnason suggests that just as those who seek out psychic advice are likely to believe in the existence of paranormal connections to the beyond, those who go to large language models are predisposed to want to find intelligence in the tokens delivered to our queries. To begin, they have likely been exposed to some measure of hype about the capabilities of the technology. To test intelligence, they begin asking about things they know, and if the answers are reflective of what the prompter knows and believes, there is a kind of kinship established. The kicker is that even if something in the LLM reply is off, the eager seeker of intelligence will re-prompt, putting the LLM back on the right path, similar to how when a psychic says something like, “I’m seeing a dog, a Labrador,” and the mark responds with, “No, but we did have a chihuahua,” and the psychic replies, “Yes, high-energy dog. That’s what I was seeing.”

The things ChatGPT is “smarter” at—primarily the speed and efficiency of production—are relatively limited as compared to our human capacities for experience, reflection, analysis, and creativity, at least as long as we continue to value things like experience, reflection, analysis, and creativity.

We are people. Large language models will always be machines. To declare the machines superior means believing that what makes humans human is inherently inferior. I acknowledge that there are many people in the world who believe this is the case, that our fragile, frequently malfunctioning, inefficient meat sacks cause us all sorts of problems, but this does not mean we must view a possible cyborg future as some kind of “progress.”

Generative AI models are trained on what has happened in the past, enshrining that world as a basis for its syntactical assemblages. To consider how this is a potential problem at a basic level, imagine that ChatGPT were primed with writing that goes no further than 1955 and ask yourself how racist the output would be.

If a hostile foreign power detonated an EMP or three over us, wiping out our entire electronic infrastructure, we’d have a hard time figuring the route to the nearest Starbucks and then tipping the barista, but we’d also have bigger problems to deal with under that scenario.

What I want to say about writing is that it is a fully embodied experience. When we do it, we are thinking and feeling. We are bringing our unique intelligences to the table and attempting to demonstrate them to the world, even when our intelligences don’t seem too intelligent.

Writing involves both the expression of an idea and the exploration of an idea—that is, when writing, you set out with an intention to say something, but as part of the attempt to capture an idea, the idea itself is altered through the thinking that happens as you consider your subject. Anyone who has written has experienced one of these mini-epiphanies that is unique to the way humans write.

The synthetic text ChatGPT produces is convincing because we confuse those surface traits for genuine meaning, often imputing (particularly in education contexts) intelligence on text that is, by and large, as featureless and indistinct, though “correct” as possible. It’s interesting that this correctness is conflated with intelligence, perhaps because it is identifiable, explicable, and easy to compare between texts, but this doesn’t mean it is something we should necessarily value.

If an idea is the atom, the true building block of writing matter, consider the notion a subatomic particle, perhaps along with the “inkling,” “sense,” “suspicion,” and “hunch.”

Rebecca Solnit, author of more than twenty books, including Men Explain Things to Me and A Paradise Built in Hell, was asked for her feelings about ChatGPT and other LLMs after the revelation that her books had been part of a database of pirated texts that were used to train generative AI applications.1
I’m a writer because I want to write. I don’t want a machine to do it for me. I’m a writer because the process of writing is creative in what I do with language, but also in how I understand the subject. I often feel that I don’t think hard enough about things until I have to write about them. Often my understanding changes in the process of writing. That’s exciting for me. That’s my own development, which, ideally, is somehow also something I can share with the readers.
I’m engaging in thinking, and what is the point of handing the job of thinking itself over, of understanding something more deeply, seeing the pattern that underlies? Why would I want to give up that profound experience?

We tend to view thinking as a solo activity, emblemized by Rodin’s famous statue of The Thinker hunched over, fist on chin, absorbed in thought. But with writing, at some point, the thinking ends, and we uncurl ourselves and present the product of our thoughts to an audience.

Writing is communication. Writers are responsible for the impact of their words on the community.

In terms of skills, writers must be able to conceive, draft, revise, and edit a piece of writing. They have to be able to make sentences that prove pleasing to the audience’s sensibilities. The skill suggests they must also be able to analyze the needs of their audience, just as chefs are thinking about the tastes of their diners. Like chefs, writers must be able to think deductively and inductively, to look at the material they have to work with and craft a message, as well as to look at the messages of others and understand how and why they work.

For knowledge, writers have two realms they must be concerned with, their knowledge of writing as a process—essentially the ways writing works—and their knowledge of the subject matter they are writing about.

In terms of attitudes, writers must be curious, open (but also skeptical), empathetic, and obsessive. They must be comfortable with ambiguity and complexity and oriented toward being both accurate in what they share of their own ideas and in how they convey the ideas of others.

I think the fact that our writing practices are hidden from audiences is one of the reasons so many people so readily came to accept what ChatGPT is doing as “writing” as opposed to automated text production.

The 10,000-Hour Rule has been debunked repeatedly, including by Ericsson himself, who declared that Gladwell got the research wrong, and “there’s nothing magical or special about ten thousand hours.”1 A meta-analysis across a number of different activities found little correlation between the amount of practice and the effect of practice, including only a 4 percent correlation in educational activities and a 1 percent correlation in professional activities.

The 10,000-Hour Rule and Duckworth’s grit theory are manifestations of a particularly American attitude toward self-improvement that a better life is right around the corner if you can simply identify and embrace “one key thing.” This attitude dominates fitness and wellness spaces as we’re informed of the optimum diets and workouts. Businesses chase one fad after another in the pursuit of increased employee productivity and profits. It’s not incidental that the business and self-help sections in the bookstore are virtually indistinguishable when it comes to the prevalence of books that promise to “unlock the keys to success” with this “one simple rule/tool/principle.

Believing that there is “one key thing” and falling for the repeated promises of those who sell such remedies is a natural outgrowth of not wanting to deal with the inevitable complexity of operating in the world as it actually is.

So, according to the raft of research and examples Grant has mustered for his book, what does matter when it comes to improving our practices? We benefit from three big principles: making sure practice is purposeful, varied, and fun. Essentially, we develop best when we ignore that we’re trying to get better at something and instead just do a bunch of stuff that’s related to our big-picture goal. Our orientation should be around finding the best fit for our interests rather than relying on grit because that fit makes it much easier to be gritty.

I believe ChatGPT is viewed as a desirable alternative because, sadly, most people have not been given the chance to explore and play within the world of writing. We have taken something that is dynamic, useful, and uniquely human and turned it into a series of rote exercises with limited or even absent purpose. This is true whether we’re talking about school, work, or otherwise.

Writing is communication within a community, and the circle is closed at the moment of reading. Because we are unique individuals, the potential results of these joinings are infinite.

Reading is thinking and feeling in all the same ways as writing. Reading is a process that allows us to better understand the world and one another, sometimes even achieving something like virtual or alternate reality in our own minds as we join with the thoughts of others

First, reading is not an innate biological function like speech. It is an adaptive behavior cobbling together the frontal, temporal, and parietal regions of the left hemisphere,2 unlike speech, which is largely confined to a specific region.
Second, reading undergirds other aspects of our overall cognitive development around memory, critical thinking, and empathy, among other things. Reading invokes the brain’s “plasticity,” the ability to adapt to new challenges. Different kinds of reading develop different aspects of our reading brains.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, digital texts are changing the way we read and appear to be threatening the skills of deep reading, the ability to be totally absorbed in a text. The challenges of concentrating on text are undermined by a culture where we are expected to spend much more time skimming and assimilating significant volumes of information than we are deeply considering the ideas and concepts in those texts.

Prior to being disgraced and convicted of fraud as a cryptocurrency Ponzi schemer, Sam Bankman-Fried told a journalist who had expressed his own love of books that Bankman-Fried would “never read a book.”
After the journalist reacted with surprise, Bankman-Fried elaborated, “I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
Writer and critic Maris Kreizman calls this the “bulletpointification” of books and believes it is endemic to a tech culture that fetishizes optimization. “It seems to me that there is a fundamental discrepancy between the way readers interact with books and the way the hack-your-brain tech community does. A wide swath of the ruling class sees books as data-intake vehicles for optimizing knowledge rather than, you know, things to intellectually engage with.”

If the large language model is going to be useful in the realm of “reading,” perhaps it is as an assistant whose job it is to monitor and sort digital texts, and being prepared to bring forth the most relevant information responsive to my specific request on demand.

Khan is merely the latest in a long line of men—and they are all men—who believe that the “problem” of teaching can be solved with a teaching machine.

It is not coincidental that teaching was (and still is) a female-dominated profession, while the engineering boom of the 1950s and 1960s was almost exclusively the province of men. This disrespect for teaching rooted in mid-twentieth-century sexism continues to be manifested today as teachers are subjected to an ever-changing list of demands without being given the time and resources necessary to do the job.

One of the ideas we must renew is that we are not the sum total of our averages. When we reduce individuals to averages and then constrain their behaviors based on those averages, we are restricting freedoms. Generative AI content is, by definition, a great averaging of what’s in the world. An embrace of this output is a kind of capitulation to the machine, rather than staying true to our nature as creatures.

You can’t think, read, research, study, learn, or teach everything. To choose one thing is to choose against many things. To know some things well is to know other things not so well, or not at all. Knowledge is always surrounded by ignorance.

Our communities inevitably must contain both those with whom we agree and those with whom we differ. As long as they are willing to see themselves as a member of the community with the well-being of the community in mind, they should be welcome.

Where to buy More Than Words by John Warner:

• Bookshop
• Amazon

• Book title: The Writing Life
• Author: Annie Dillard
• Rating: 3/5

I don't fully understand why this book is so beloved by writers. It's yet another book by an author who writes about writing but, I feel, dislikes writing. Am I the only one who doesn't experience pain from writing? Then again, Dillard has a Pulitzer Prize, and I do not, so perhaps I need to suffer more when writing.

Notes & Highlights

Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading—that is a good life.

He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.

Where to buy The Writing Life by Annie Dillard:

• Bookshop
• Amazon