Apathy
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
— Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom
You know I’ve always been a dreamer
(spent my life running ’round)
And it’s so hard to change
(Can’t seem to settle down)
But the dreams I’ve seen lately
Keep on turning out and burning out
And turning out the same
So put me on a highway
And show me a sign
And take it to the limit one more time
From Take It To The Limit
I had the good fortune of seeing The Eagles in concert on Friday night on their History of the Eagles tour. Nostalgia ruled the night. Everyone from the original band was was there, and everyone was a few years older than their prime days in the late ’70s. But the music was a s good as it ever was (which is to say, ‘good but not great’). Joe Walsh, however, brought the house down with great stage energy and fantastics renditions of Rocky Mountain High, and Life’s Been Good.
You don’t need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Don’t even listen, simply wait.
Don’t even wait.
Be quite still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you.
To be unmasked, it has no choice.
It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
— Franz Kafka
If you are going through hell, keep going.
— Winston Churchill
The descent into dysfunction is a long, slow process. At no point is there a conscious choice to be dysfunctional.
— Unknown, possibly original
Creativity: a type of process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
It is hard for a free fish to understand what is happening to a hooked one.
— Karl A. Menninger, The Human Mind
This quote is a more poetic version of the one I posted yesterday that said, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
According to Dr. George Watson at the University of Delaware, Karl Menninger was an early psychoanalyst who was probably referring to the criminal mind in this quote. Dr. Watson provides an expanded context of the quote.