The Stoicists had a tradition of autobiographical writing very different from what we today consider autobiographical writing. A diary, for them, was a book where one would write down philosophical maximes, aphorisms, etc. Not only were you meant to read those time and time again, but think them and, well, sort of incorporate them, in order to make you immune - stoic is the word! - to life's ups and downs: the thought behind it being that once you really got into a bad situation, you would be able to live through it with dignitiy, because of all these wisdoms you had already made the effort to introject before (if I remember correctly, Seneca has a lot to say about this in his letters to Marc Aurel).
In the year of 1999/2000 (gosh, my life cycle has been running in semesters for way too long now), I started a sort of notebook where I wrote down all kinds of quotes and, well, I guess what you might call "words of wisdom". It was the year I was an Aupair in the US; I had just finished school and took a long break from all sort of things (family, friends, my home country - in brief: life as I knew it) to figure out what I wanted to do "in the future". During that year, I devoted myself to a couple of things (going out like a lunatic, gaining a lot of weight, etc.), and one of them was reading the "classics". I went about it in my usual, more or less systematic (you might call it neurotic) way: Like you would start a special diet, I set out to make lists of the books I wanted to read, slowly and more or less continuously making my way through the list, ingesting the various books piece by piece. I then had another list where I would write down all the books I had actually read (which, as you might guess, was quite different from the initial "to-read-list" [btw: I love lists, in case you haven't noticed]). And then one day I started writing down passages of books in a notebook (bought especially for the purpose).
For reasons one might call coincidental or fateful, the notebook re-emerged this weekend as I was searching for something else. 'Course I started reading in it, and was touched, again - but maybe in a different way than 8 years ago - , by the words, always, and always again words written down by somebody else, unknown to me and under unknown circumstances but which, strangely enough, made a whole lot of sense to me and my life. In any case, here goes a brief selection of my personal words of widsom...
Why waste your final hours racing about your cage denying you're a squirrel?
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Prime numbers. It was all so neat and elegant. Numbers that refuse to cooperate, that don't change or divide, numbers that remain themselves for all eternity.
Paul Auster, The Music of Chance
His name was Disastrous because his godmother thought it such a pretty word.
Jean Rhys, Wide Saragasso Sea
Any description of the main street of Fort Curtis can begin and end inside this very sentence. Beyond that I find only redundancy.
Don DeLillo, Americana
Another odd feature of the parallel universe is that although it is invisible from this side, once you are in it you can easily see the world you came from. Sometimes the world you came from looks huge and menacing, quivering like a vast pile of jelly; at other times it is miniaturized and alluring, a-spin and shining in its orbit. Either way, it can't be discounted. Every window on Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
Suzanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted
I regard kids as hostages to the malvolent.
Philip Roth, I married a Communist
In the year of 1999/2000 (gosh, my life cycle has been running in semesters for way too long now), I started a sort of notebook where I wrote down all kinds of quotes and, well, I guess what you might call "words of wisdom". It was the year I was an Aupair in the US; I had just finished school and took a long break from all sort of things (family, friends, my home country - in brief: life as I knew it) to figure out what I wanted to do "in the future". During that year, I devoted myself to a couple of things (going out like a lunatic, gaining a lot of weight, etc.), and one of them was reading the "classics". I went about it in my usual, more or less systematic (you might call it neurotic) way: Like you would start a special diet, I set out to make lists of the books I wanted to read, slowly and more or less continuously making my way through the list, ingesting the various books piece by piece. I then had another list where I would write down all the books I had actually read (which, as you might guess, was quite different from the initial "to-read-list" [btw: I love lists, in case you haven't noticed]). And then one day I started writing down passages of books in a notebook (bought especially for the purpose).
For reasons one might call coincidental or fateful, the notebook re-emerged this weekend as I was searching for something else. 'Course I started reading in it, and was touched, again - but maybe in a different way than 8 years ago - , by the words, always, and always again words written down by somebody else, unknown to me and under unknown circumstances but which, strangely enough, made a whole lot of sense to me and my life. In any case, here goes a brief selection of my personal words of widsom...
Why waste your final hours racing about your cage denying you're a squirrel?
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Prime numbers. It was all so neat and elegant. Numbers that refuse to cooperate, that don't change or divide, numbers that remain themselves for all eternity.
Paul Auster, The Music of Chance
His name was Disastrous because his godmother thought it such a pretty word.
Jean Rhys, Wide Saragasso Sea
Any description of the main street of Fort Curtis can begin and end inside this very sentence. Beyond that I find only redundancy.
Don DeLillo, Americana
Another odd feature of the parallel universe is that although it is invisible from this side, once you are in it you can easily see the world you came from. Sometimes the world you came from looks huge and menacing, quivering like a vast pile of jelly; at other times it is miniaturized and alluring, a-spin and shining in its orbit. Either way, it can't be discounted. Every window on Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
Suzanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted
I regard kids as hostages to the malvolent.
Philip Roth, I married a Communist
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