Lin Yutang "On Dreams"

Mr. Lin Yutang continues to amaze me. Here are some quotes from his book, The Importance of Living, in the chapter, "On Dreams."

"Perhaps all philosophy began with a sense of boredom. Anyway it is characteristic of humans to have a sad, vague and wistful longing for an ideal."

"The private dreams of being a corporal, the corporal dreams of being a captain, and the captain dreams of being a major or colonel."

"The world is therefore pretty much like an a la carte restaurant where everybody thinks the food the next table has ordered is so much more inviting and delicious than his own."

"Everybody wants to be somebody so long as that somebody is not himself."

"The greater the imaginative power of a man, the more perpetually he is dissatisfied."

"On the whole, humanity is as much led astray as led upwards by this capacity for idealism, but human progress without this imaginative gift is itself unthinkable."

"For I think we are constituted like a receiving set for ideas, as radio sets are equipped for receiving music from the air. Some sets with a finer response pick up the finer short waves which are lost to the other sets, and why, of course, that finer, more distant music is all the more precious if only because it is less easily perceivable."

"And so, out in an alley, up in an attic, or down in the barn or lying along the waterside, a child always dreams, and the dreams are real."

"Some of these children's dreams are clearer than others, and they have a force which compel their own realization; on the other hand, with growing age, those less clear dreams are forgotten, and we all live through life trying to tell those dreams of our childhood, and 'sometimes we die ere we find the language'."

"People fight for their dreams as much as they fight for their earthly possessions. And so dreams descend from the world of idle visions and enter the world of reality, and become a real force in our life."

"However vague they are, dreams have a way of concealing themselves and leave us no peace until they are translated into reality, like seeds germinating under ground, sure to sprout in their search for sunlight. Dreams are very real things."

From "On Dreams" in The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang
(bold mine)

NY Times Book Review: "Subdivided We Fall"

Here are some interesting philosophical quotes that describe our modern era. Can you relate?

"We have built a country," Bishop writes, "where everyone can choose neighbors(and church and news shows) most compatible with his or her lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this segregation by way of life: pockets of like-minded citizens have become so ideologically inbred that we don't know, can't understand, and can barely conceive of 'those people' who live just a few miles away."

Bishop argues that this clustering of like with like accelerated in the tumult of the 1960s when, unmoored from the organizations and traditions that had guided their choices about how to live, Americans grew anxious and disorientated--and reflexively sought comfort in the familiar, cocooning themselves in communities of people like themselves . . .

Does this balkanization matter? Bishop argues convincingly that it does . . .

"Mix company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes."

From "Subdivided We Fall" New York Times Book Review by Scott Stossel

Review of The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart, by Bill Bishop with Robert G. Cushing

W.H. Auden

Leap Before You Look

The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep
And break the by-laws any fool can keep;
It is not the convention but the fear
That has a tendency to disappear.

The worried efforts of the busy heap,
The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer
Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;
Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.

The clothes that are considered right to wear
Will not be either sensible or cheap,
So long as we consent to live like sheep
And never mention those who disappear.

Much can be said for social savoir-fairs,
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one is watching, but you will have to leap.

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of saftey has to disappear.

W.H. Auden

(Qtd. in Poems to Live By In Uncertain Times)

Anne Paris on "Immersion"

MAKE IMMERSION THE GOAL

Rather than focusing on production or performance, focus on having an immersive experience. In other words, if you reach toward accomplishment, you are keeping your experience on an external, evaluative plane. Because you are observing yourself and judging your performance based on external measures, fears of inadequacy or failure are more likely to surface. By switching your focus to internal experience, you are more likely to find a path to your creativity.

Anne Paris, from "Standing at Water's Edge"

Lin Yutang "On Having a Mind"

As some of you know, my current fascination is with the Chinese philosopher, Lin Yutang. Here are some insights from the chapter, "On Having a Mind", in his book The Importance of Living.

"All novels would be unreadable did we know exactly how the mind of each character was going to work and were we able consequently to predict the exact outcome. The reading of a novel is but the chase of a wayward and unpredictable mind making its incalculable decisions at certain moments, through a maze of evolving circumstances."

"The human mind is charming in its unreasonableness, its inveterate prejudices, and its waywardness and unpredictability."

"My conception of the human brain, as of all animal brains, is that it is like an octopus or a starfish with tentacles, tentacles for feeling the truth and eating it."

"We all labor under the misconception that the true function of the mind is thinking, a misconception that is bound to lead to serious mistakes in philosophy unless we revise our notion of the term 'thinking' itself."

"I prefer to have our mind charmingly unreasonable as it is at present. I should hate to see a world in which we are all perfectly rational beings. Do I distrust scientific progress? No, I distrust sainthood. Am I anti-intellectualistic? Perhaps yes; perhaps no. I am merely in love with life, and being in love with life, I distrust the intellect profoundly."

"But the very charm of biography, its very readability, depends on showing the human side of a great character which is so similar to ours. Every touch of irrational behavior in a biography is a stroke in convincing reality."

"I consider the education of our senses and our emotions rather more important than the eduction of our ideas."

D.W. Winnicott on "Potential Space"

Potential space is infused with primitive creativity, which later extends to all cultural phenomena, such as the areas of play and artistic creativity and appreciation, and of religious feeling, and of dreaming and also of fetishism, lying and stealing, the origin and loss of affectionate feeling, drug addiction, the talisman of obsessional rituals.

D.W. Winnicott, qtd. by Anne Paris (Standing at the Water's Edge)

Jonathan Lethem on "The Dark Knight"

I began to feel this Batman wears his mask because he fears he's a fake--and the story of his inauthenticity, the possibility of his unmasking, counts for more than any hope he offers of deliverance from evil.

Jonathan Lethem, from "The Art of Darkness"