Damek.

Still reading Sixty Days of Night by KSR. (It’s slow going only because I have so little time to read between work, school, life. I could finish it in a day if I had one; but books are just for the commute & bedtime for now, and I should probably be reading my textbooks on the commute!)

I’m in the middle, and amongst some buddhism & science, he’s peppering in some quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson. I believe we read his essay “Self-Reliance” in high school, in American History. Beyond that, KSR’s character Frank is right when he says we Americans are impoverished for not reading more of him as we grow up, for not acknowledging him more fully as a great American thinker. I intend to … if I ever have more time to read again!

For now, random quotes.

From his essay “Nature“, this bit was in the KSR book, and resonated with my own experience as something I’ve had and want more of:

In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.

I have had that many times, usually when alone, occasionally shared. It’s best when shared, but in solitude has a special value. Sometimes in serene silence — in fact, it’s often such silence that brings it, when we hear little but our own body doing the work of life. But sometimes it comes with a soundtrack… blessed be headphones! Ha.

It also strikes me as intimately related with true science, or what I think of as science. Observation & understanding is a sort of worship & celebration of… of everything.

And this, which I believe is from his essay “Fate,” and complements my recent thinking on both fate (strange goings on in my life this year), and on decision & acting:

To hazard the contradiction - freedom is necessary. If you please to plant yourself on the side of Fate, and say, Fate is all; then we say, a part of Fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting…

KSR follows this with character action: “With a sure hand he opened the door on the day.”