“we all filter reality through the same set of feeble sensory organs, so any attempt to portray being as we understand it bears intrinsic limitations.” Lucia Berlin vs Raymond Carver by Julien Levy Apr 23, 2025
We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. – Joseph Campbell (1904-1987)
Patience is the calm acceptance that things can happen in a different order than the one you have in mind. – David G. Allen
The world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities. The artist who never makes art becomes cynical about those who do. The lover who never risks loving mocks romance. The thinker who never commits to a philosophy sneers at belief itself. And yet, all of them suffer, because deep down they know: the life they mock is the life they were meant to live. – Carl Jung
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, is not an act, but a habit. 我们是我们反复做的事情，卓越不是一种行为，而是一种习惯。亚里士多德（Aristotle）
The only real things in life is the unexpected things. Everything else is just an illusion. – Watkin Tudor Jones
Just remember that we have everything we need to change our life and the world around us. The world is an abstraction to our minds and it contains two parts, one real and the other imaginative. The real part (the reality) we experince through our senses (the sensed world is just a small part of the reality). The imaginative one we feel with our minds (this only exists in the mind). The world in our mind is both smaller and shorter than the universe (the reality). But it is much bigger that the world we are facing.
The rule is realized by “divide and conquer” because man is different anyway. To control is the instinct of power. Not to control individual, but to set up the platform, the media and the market to influence each individual. The technology is driven by the need, sooner or later, it evolves into the tools of the power. AI is the latest example. Why so much capital is poured into it? The control of the power in capitalism.
This writing is an attempt to clear my head. There are too many crises to reveal the deeper of the world if you pay attenttion to. Wars, financial crises, environmental crises. What are they telling you?
Some examples to validate my idea about the world:
- Charles de gaulle began his war memoirs with this sentence: “All my life I have had a certain idea about France.” Well, all my life I have had a certain idea about America. I have thought of America as a deeply flawed nation that is nonetheless a force for tremendous good in the world. From Abraham Lincoln to Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan and beyond, Americans fought for freedom and human dignity and against tyranny; we promoted democracy, funded the Marshall Plan, and saved millions of people across Africa from HIV and AIDS. When we caused harm—Vietnam, Iraq—it was because of our overconfidence and naivete, not evil intentions. – David Brooks
- the origin of student debt from theintercept by Internet Archive in 1966, Berkeley, then nearly free to attend for California residents, had become a national center of organizing against the Vietnam War. Deep anxiety about this reached the highest levels of the U.S. government. John McCone, the head of the CIA, requested a meeting with J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, to discuss “communist influence” at Berkeley, a situation that “definitely required some corrective action.”
Reagan pushed to cut state funding for California’s public colleges but did not reveal his ideological motivation. Rather, he said, the state simply needed to save money. To cover the funding shortfall, Reagan suggested that California public college could charge residents tuition for the first time. This, he complained, “resulted in the almost hysterical charge that this would deny educational opportunities to those of the most moderate means. This is obviously untrue. … We made it plain that tuition must be accompanied by adequate loans to be paid back after graduation.”
In retrospect, this period was the clear turning point in America’s policies toward higher education. For decades, there had been enthusiastic bipartisan agreement that states should fund high-quality public colleges so that their youth could receive higher education for free or nearly so. That has now vanished. In 1968, California residents paid a $300 yearly fee to attend Berkeley, the equivalent of about $2,000 now. Now tuition at Berkeley is $15,000, with total yearly student costs reaching almost $40,000.
- another excerpt from Raymond Carver
Some writers have a bunch of talent; I don’t know any writers who are without it. But a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, that’s something else… It’s akin to style, what I’m talking about, but it isn’t style alone. It is the writer’s particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other.