unprompted/Notes/room-of-ones-own.md

Rough Notes

• If I never try, I can live with the illusion that I'm something. And the fear of loosing that, of breaking the illusion, can be paralyzing.
• But letting go of that, embracing failure not as the loss of self, an injured vanity, is liberation, and the best way to figure out where you actually stand.
• And from there, with your feet firmly on the ground, you can decide where to go. Do you keep up your pursuit? Do you discover it's not all you imagined and go elsewhere?
• Something, something, advertising.
• My preferred strategy is something like: this thing you're noticing has been happening for a while, and the thing you're worried about, hasn't happened or has a solution.

Quotes

• "Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them"
  • The best disclaimer I've heard yet: it's paralyzing to try articulating the truth. She's put thought into her words, but it's also not so inhibited by the struggle to only communicate truth.
  • It's really easy to get stuck. To play the sentence over in my head, and to edit it internally, and then get hopelessly tangled in revisions and doubts.
  • If I abandon the notion that a single expression should contain the absolute truth, in a pure polished form, then I can let the rough and raw, pre-processed thought flow out more freely.
  • I really don't know if this is what she meant. But it resonated with me, nonetheless.
  • "The need of coming to some conclusion on a subject..."
• "when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been."
  • Just my own invasive thinking - but what's the godddamn point of something if you can't leave an impression upon it?
  • To have a greater movement, induced by the current you ride upon.
  • But to forfeit one's own impact. You've discovered a greater channel, and can choose to ride along or remain. The flow is indifferent.
• "the University indeed seemed a sanctuary in which are preserved rare types which would soon be obsolete if left to fight for existence on the pavement of the Strand."
• "how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished."
  • "The looking-glass vision is of supreme importance because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervous system. Take it away and man may die, like the drug fiend deprived of his cocaine."
• "And one gathers from this enormous modern literature of confession and self-analysis that to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty... [made harder] to bear [by] the world's notorious indifference"
• "Clearly her mind has by no means 'consumed all impediments and become incandescent.' On the contrary, it is harassed and distracted with hates and grievances."
• "Had Tolstoi lived... in seclusion with a married lady 'cut off from what is called the world,' however edifying the moral lesson, he could scarcely... have written WAR AND PEACE."

Questions

Definitions

• Beadle (n.) ~ fucking twat
  • ceremonial officer of a church, college or similar stuffy occupation
• Verger (n.) ~ Syn. fucking twat
  • attendant to the church, carrier of the ceremonial stick.
• Jonquille (n.) ~ a flower. A smelly, yellow flower.