Reading Notes of the Week #2

This week’s reading notes taken from multiple books that I am currently reading:

1. Not responding is a response — we are equally responsible for what we don’t do.
2. Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
3. This should remind us that violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I have the right to control you.
4. Feeding my child is not like feeding myself: it matters more. It matters because food matters (his physical health matters, the pleasure of eating matters), and because the stories that are served with food matter.
5. I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.
6. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
7. Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don’t.
8. Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or decline from it. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that reality doesn’t necessarily match our plans.
9. The ways creative work gets done are always unpredictable, demanding room to roam, refusing schedules and systems. They cannot be reduced to replicable formulas.
10. If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?