Recently Quoted

• Oh, Life! Here I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers.

  an excerpt from Moby-Dick, written by Herman Melville in 1851

• Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.

  an excerpt from Moby-Dick, written by Herman Melville in 1851

• There is actually no more dangerous solitude than that of the man who is lost in a crowd, who does not know he is alone and who does not function as a person in a community either. He does not face the risks of true solitude or its responsi-bilities, and at the same time the multitude has taken all other responsibilities off his shoulders. Yet he is by no means free of care; he is burdened by the diffuse, anonymous anxiety, the nameless fears, the petty itching lusts and the all pervading hostilities which fill mass society the way water fills the ocean.

  an excerpt from New Seeds of Contemplation, written by Thomas Merton in 1949

Recently Noted

• This is absolutely unrelated to the text of the book, but the book-as-object here is kind of infuriating. It's a very weird size! The book is almost sized like every other nonfiction self-help hardback, except it's about inch or two wider. The page width is ridiculous, which means the line length is a little uncomfortable, and even just opening the book and holding a spread open feels like I'm setting out a picnic blanket.
  
  I'm sure the publishers and designers had a good reason for all this, but I would LOVE to read the email threads where they hashed this out.

  an note about Outlive, written by Peter Attia in 2023

• Another anecdata I'll be thinking about for years: most car accident deaths aren't highways - they're getting T-boned in an intersection, on the driver's side. The light turns green, you enter the intersection, you get crushed by a truck running the red light coming from your left side.
  
  And while highway accidents are multivariate and complicated - entering an intersection is not. You can just... LOOK. Is somebody hauling ass to make it through the red? Don't pull in front of them.

  an note about Outlive, written by Peter Attia in 2023

• A really notable thing for me: you can't just think of what you want to do when you're 80 and train for it linearly. Like, if I want to be able to go for a 2 mile walk when I'm 80, I can't just do 2 miles when I'm 40 and keep it up for forty more years. You'll decline in predictable ways as you age, like losing some % muscle mass per decade, etc. So if I want to do X at 80, I need to be doing 5X at 40. Those aren't real numbers, of course, but that's the idea.

  an note about Outlive, written by Peter Attia in 2023

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