Sunday, December 15, 2013
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Irish Whiskey Toast
"You're all heathens, despicable to the end, but that is why I call you my friend"
-Mossie Powers
Friday, December 6, 2013
Well, here it goes again.
This feels far too familiar. Can we just not have all of these emotions again? I swear every single thing I'm feeling I've felt before, nothing new. All recycled emotions and outcomes.
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
85 Jack Kerouac Quotes For The Traveler Inside You
Taken from Thought Catalog
DEC. 4, 2013
By NAJWAH ESSOP
Jack Kerouac was a free thinker, visionary, philosopher, rebel, co-founder of the beat generation with an insatiable wanderlust and perpetual love for the unknown and adventure. He lived, and like many of us today, questioned life, questioned his existence. His life was a series of passion and ecstasy and searching. Even though it’s been almost 50 years since his passing, young adults can relate to his “madness” now more than ever.
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.
I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.
Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.
The only truth is music.
There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.
Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.
My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.
What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.
A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.
Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream.
Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.
The best teacher is experience and not through someone’s distorted point of view.
Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.
I don’t know, I don’t care, and it doesn’t make any difference.
I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.
I was surprised, as always, be how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.
I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was – I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.
Will you love me in December as you do in May?
It all ends in tears anyway.
I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.
What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?
My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.
I’m going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children.
Life must be rich and full of loving–it’s no good otherwise, no good at all, for anyone.
It always makes me proud to love the world somehow- hate’s so easy compared.
I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.
Houses are full of things that gather dust.
And the story of love is a long sad tale ending in graves.
Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
I’m writing this book because we’re all going to die.
I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.
On soft Spring nights I’ll stand in the yard under the stars – Something good will come out of all things yet – And it will be golden and eternal just like that – There’s no need to say another word.
Finding Nirvana is like locating silence.
They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there – and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see.
‘Sal, we gotta go and never stop going ’till we get there.’
‘Where we going, man?’
‘I don’t know but we gotta go.
We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time.
Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.
A sociable smile is nothing but a mouth full of teeth.
Things are so hard to figure out when you live from day to day in this feverish and silly world.
One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.
As far as I’m concerned the only thing to do is sit in a room and get drunk.
The page is long, blank, and full of truth. When I am through with it, it shall probably be long, full, and empty with words.
I feel guilty for being a member of the human race.
Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH…
So therefore I dedicate myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being.
Maybe that’s what life is… a wink of the eye and winking stars.
Are we fallen angels who didn’t want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?
Pain or love or danger makes you real again…
‘What do you want out of life?’ I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Just wait on tables and try to get along.’ She yawned. I put my hand over her mouth and told her not to yawn. I tried to tell her how excited I was about life and the things we could do together; saying that, and planning to leave Denver in two days. She turned away wearily. We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad.
My aunt once said that the world would never find peace until men fell at their women’s feet and asked for forgiveness.
If critics say your work stinks it’s because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered “dangerous” but set in place in their compartmental understandings.
I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.
The road is life.
The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.
If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.
Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.
All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.
I believed in a good home, in sane and sound living, in good food, good times, work, faith and hope. I have always believed in these things. It was with some amazement that I realized I was one of the few people in the world who really believed in these things without going around making a dull middle class philosophy out of it. I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.
It’ll take you eternities to get rid of me,’ she adds sadly, which makes me jealous, I want her to say I’ll never get rid of her – I want to be chased till eternity till I catch her.
There are worse things than being mad.
I promise I shall never give up, and that I’ll die yelling and laughing, and that until then I’ll rush around this world I insist is holy and pull at everyone’s lapel and make them confess to me and to all.
All he needed was a wheel in his hand and four on the road.
Forgive everyone for your own sins and be sure to tell them you love them which you do.
Let nature do the freezing and frightening and isolating in this world. Let men work and love and fight it off.
He saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labor, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings — all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavor. They went on forever and were forever incomplete, far from perfect, refined, or smooth, full of terrible memories of failure and fears of failure, yet, in the way of things, somehow noble, complete, and shining in the end.
My eyes were glued on life and they were full of tears.
My manners, abominable at times, can be sweet. As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind. I’m a wretch. But I love, love.
Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind. Now that we know this, throw the raft away.
For the first time in my life the weather was not something that touched me, that caressed me, froze or sweated me, but became me.
The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die?
The details are the life of it, I insist, say everything on your mind, don’t hold back, don’t analyze or anything as you go along, say it out.
…we all must admit that everything is fine and there’s no need in the world to worry, and in fact we should realize what it would mean to us to UNDERSTAND that we’re not REALLY worried about ANYTHING.
You’d be surprised how little I knew even up to yesterday.
Ah, it was a fine night, a warm night, a wine-drinking night, a moony night, and a night to hug your girl and talk and spit and be heavengoing.
When you’ve understood this scripture, throw it away. If you can’t understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom.
Colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization.
Let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.
What difference does it make after all?–anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what’s heaven? what’s earth? All in the mind.
The empty blue sky of space says ‘All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I don’t care, it still belongs to me.
Better to sleep in an uncomfortable bed free, than sleep in a comfortable bed unfree.
The beauty of things must be that they end.
If you own a rug you own too much.
‘I just won’t sleep,’ I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do.
DEC. 4, 2013
By NAJWAH ESSOP
Jack Kerouac was a free thinker, visionary, philosopher, rebel, co-founder of the beat generation with an insatiable wanderlust and perpetual love for the unknown and adventure. He lived, and like many of us today, questioned life, questioned his existence. His life was a series of passion and ecstasy and searching. Even though it’s been almost 50 years since his passing, young adults can relate to his “madness” now more than ever.
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.
I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.
Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.
The only truth is music.
There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.
Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.
My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.
What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.
A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.
Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream.
Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.
The best teacher is experience and not through someone’s distorted point of view.
Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.
I don’t know, I don’t care, and it doesn’t make any difference.
I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.
I was surprised, as always, be how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.
I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was – I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.
Will you love me in December as you do in May?
It all ends in tears anyway.
I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.
What’s in store for me in the direction I don’t take?
My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.
I’m going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children.
Life must be rich and full of loving–it’s no good otherwise, no good at all, for anyone.
It always makes me proud to love the world somehow- hate’s so easy compared.
I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.
Houses are full of things that gather dust.
And the story of love is a long sad tale ending in graves.
Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
I’m writing this book because we’re all going to die.
I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.
On soft Spring nights I’ll stand in the yard under the stars – Something good will come out of all things yet – And it will be golden and eternal just like that – There’s no need to say another word.
Finding Nirvana is like locating silence.
They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there – and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see.
‘Sal, we gotta go and never stop going ’till we get there.’
‘Where we going, man?’
‘I don’t know but we gotta go.
We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time.
Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.
A sociable smile is nothing but a mouth full of teeth.
Things are so hard to figure out when you live from day to day in this feverish and silly world.
One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.
As far as I’m concerned the only thing to do is sit in a room and get drunk.
The page is long, blank, and full of truth. When I am through with it, it shall probably be long, full, and empty with words.
I feel guilty for being a member of the human race.
Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH…
So therefore I dedicate myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being.
Maybe that’s what life is… a wink of the eye and winking stars.
Are we fallen angels who didn’t want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?
Pain or love or danger makes you real again…
‘What do you want out of life?’ I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Just wait on tables and try to get along.’ She yawned. I put my hand over her mouth and told her not to yawn. I tried to tell her how excited I was about life and the things we could do together; saying that, and planning to leave Denver in two days. She turned away wearily. We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad.
My aunt once said that the world would never find peace until men fell at their women’s feet and asked for forgiveness.
If critics say your work stinks it’s because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered “dangerous” but set in place in their compartmental understandings.
I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.
The road is life.
The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.
If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.
Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.
All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.
I believed in a good home, in sane and sound living, in good food, good times, work, faith and hope. I have always believed in these things. It was with some amazement that I realized I was one of the few people in the world who really believed in these things without going around making a dull middle class philosophy out of it. I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.
It’ll take you eternities to get rid of me,’ she adds sadly, which makes me jealous, I want her to say I’ll never get rid of her – I want to be chased till eternity till I catch her.
There are worse things than being mad.
I promise I shall never give up, and that I’ll die yelling and laughing, and that until then I’ll rush around this world I insist is holy and pull at everyone’s lapel and make them confess to me and to all.
All he needed was a wheel in his hand and four on the road.
Forgive everyone for your own sins and be sure to tell them you love them which you do.
Let nature do the freezing and frightening and isolating in this world. Let men work and love and fight it off.
He saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labor, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings — all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavor. They went on forever and were forever incomplete, far from perfect, refined, or smooth, full of terrible memories of failure and fears of failure, yet, in the way of things, somehow noble, complete, and shining in the end.
My eyes were glued on life and they were full of tears.
My manners, abominable at times, can be sweet. As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind. I’m a wretch. But I love, love.
Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind. Now that we know this, throw the raft away.
For the first time in my life the weather was not something that touched me, that caressed me, froze or sweated me, but became me.
The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die?
The details are the life of it, I insist, say everything on your mind, don’t hold back, don’t analyze or anything as you go along, say it out.
…we all must admit that everything is fine and there’s no need in the world to worry, and in fact we should realize what it would mean to us to UNDERSTAND that we’re not REALLY worried about ANYTHING.
You’d be surprised how little I knew even up to yesterday.
Ah, it was a fine night, a warm night, a wine-drinking night, a moony night, and a night to hug your girl and talk and spit and be heavengoing.
When you’ve understood this scripture, throw it away. If you can’t understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom.
Colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization.
Let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.
What difference does it make after all?–anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what’s heaven? what’s earth? All in the mind.
The empty blue sky of space says ‘All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I don’t care, it still belongs to me.
Better to sleep in an uncomfortable bed free, than sleep in a comfortable bed unfree.
The beauty of things must be that they end.
If you own a rug you own too much.
‘I just won’t sleep,’ I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do.
Can I Come Feel Terrible Next To You
December 4th, 2013 By Laura Jayne Martin
I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to write about it. I just want to sit here and feel it. Then, I want to look over and see you.
The purity of your silent understanding soothes my invisible wounds. I just want to watch you read. I just want to listen to you talk on the phone while I nap. Do you mind if I lay on your couch and use your voice to ease myself into and out of a few dreams? I just want to take up slightly less psychic and gestural space than is usual for me. I just want to come feel terrible next to you.
I only need a few minutes because things are pretty okay with me for the most part. I know this couple—they’re married now—and one time when the girl felt sad, the boy said, “But you’ve got all your teeth, you lucky girl!” I have all my teeth. I have all my teeth and more.
So right now I just need a few minutes in a room, just a somber interstitial. I’ll sit here and let these feelings move by me like a truck across a freeway overpass. You are kind enough to let my spool unravel, knowing I promise to clean everything up when I’m done. You always know all the right words to say and how to keep them to yourself at a time like this—you are heroically still.
I won’t make this a habit. Everybody on earth has to pull their own weight; everyone on earth has to endure their own gravity. So if I can just come by for a little while—to feel terrible—I would really appreciate it. I don’t like feeling terrible, sometimes it’s just necessary. What I like is knowing that you’ll be there with me. What I like is knowing you’ll say, “Yes,” before I ask.
I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to write about it. I just want to sit here and feel it. Then, I want to look over and see you.
The purity of your silent understanding soothes my invisible wounds. I just want to watch you read. I just want to listen to you talk on the phone while I nap. Do you mind if I lay on your couch and use your voice to ease myself into and out of a few dreams? I just want to take up slightly less psychic and gestural space than is usual for me. I just want to come feel terrible next to you.
I only need a few minutes because things are pretty okay with me for the most part. I know this couple—they’re married now—and one time when the girl felt sad, the boy said, “But you’ve got all your teeth, you lucky girl!” I have all my teeth. I have all my teeth and more.
So right now I just need a few minutes in a room, just a somber interstitial. I’ll sit here and let these feelings move by me like a truck across a freeway overpass. You are kind enough to let my spool unravel, knowing I promise to clean everything up when I’m done. You always know all the right words to say and how to keep them to yourself at a time like this—you are heroically still.
I won’t make this a habit. Everybody on earth has to pull their own weight; everyone on earth has to endure their own gravity. So if I can just come by for a little while—to feel terrible—I would really appreciate it. I don’t like feeling terrible, sometimes it’s just necessary. What I like is knowing that you’ll be there with me. What I like is knowing you’ll say, “Yes,” before I ask.
Absolutely Inspired (Highlighted my favorite parts)
Cal lecturer's email to students goes viral: "Why I am not canceling class tomorrow"
“I email my students all the time—that isn’t unusual,” Alexander Coward tells us. “What is very unusual is for one of those emails to go viral.”
The UC Berkeley’s math lecturer’s surprise is understandable. Among the torrent of listicles, kitty gifs, and Youtube clips depicting moderate-to-severe injury that seize the imagination of the Internet daily, an email from a professor to his 800 students about the scheduling details of his class is hardly the stuff that memes are made of.
And yet Coward’s email—in which he used the opportunity of a University of California workers’ strike action to speak at length of the virtues of a college education—seems to have tapped a particular nerve.
Since firing off the 2,000-plus word email on Tuesday night, the professor has been flooded with emails—from students in his math class, yes, but also from their friends and from their friends. He’s heard from students at other universities, in other states, and in other countries. He’s heard from their parents too. The overall tone, he says, has been gushingly grateful. Many have thanked him for reminding them of the value of their education. A few have vowed to quit part-time jobs or to otherwise redouble their focus toward their studies. Meanwhile, on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, the email is rippling outward.
Coward says he has mixed feelings about all the attention. He wrote the email in response to the sense of anxiety he says he was detecting among many of his students in response to the ongoing labor action, but he didn’t intend it as a missive against the striking workers themselves.
“I don’t want to get embroiled in the conflict about how workers are being treated,” he says. “I haven’t made myself an expert about that. But I do consider myself an expert in education.”
The full text of Alexander Coward’s email is below:
Dear All,As some of you may have heard, there is some strike activity taking place on campus tomorrow.I want to let you know that I will not be striking, which means that I will be, so-to-speak, crossing a picket line. Moreover, I know that two of your GSIs have decided to strike, but because I happen to be free in the afternoon when they teach, and because I enjoy teaching smaller classes from time to time and I haven’t had a chance to in a while, I’ll be covering those sections. If you were planning to see me at office hours tomorrow afternoon, then feel free to come to one of the sections I’ll be covering. I will be in Stephens 230c from 2:10 to 4pm, Cory Hall 285 from 4:10pm to 5pm, and Evans Hall 6 from 5:10pm-6pm.The reason for me taking this decision is extremely simple: We have 7 class days left until the end of the course. Despite the fact that we’ve made good time and are likely to finish the syllabus with a few lectures in hand for review, class hours are valuable and your education is too important to just cancel a class if we don’t have to. Whatever the alleged injustices are that are being protested about tomorrow, it is clear that you are not responsible for those things, whatever they are, and I do not think you should be denied an education because of someone else’s fight that you are not responsible for. I say this with no disrespect whatsoever to the two GSIs who have decided to strike. Societies where people stand up for what they believe in are generally better than societies where people do not, sometimes dramatically so. Further, I cannot discount the possibility that I may be in the wrong on this and they may be right. I have certainly been on the wrong side of political judgements before and I’m sure I will be again. However from a practical point of view I’ve made my decision and you should all turn up to class and discussion tomorrow as normal.Beyond practical matters, I think it’s also worth reflecting a little on the broader relationship between politics and your education, and I think I have some important things to share on this topic that may be helpful to you.I do this with some trepidation. Normally I try to avoid talking about politics with my students and also my professional colleagues because people have a wide variety of views, sometimes held with great conviction and feeling. If I was to get into a political disagreement with one of you or one of my colleagues, it might get in the way of or distract us from the central mission we have of working together to give you a great education.However sometimes political events reach into our lives without our invitation or control, and we have no choice but to engage with each other about politics. Many times in history it has done so with far more violence and disruption than a strike, and it is wise to be psychologically prepared for this fact.If I’ve learned one thing about politics since I was your age, it is this: Politics, like most things in life worth thinking about, including mathematics, is very big, very complicated, and very interconnected. I’ve lived and worked in four countries on four continents, all with societies set up differently both politically and socially. I’ve discovered that there is no unique or obviously best way of setting up society. For every decision and judgement you reach, there are people who benefit and people who lose out. It’s the same with the way I teach my classes. I know that for every decision I make about how to teach you there are some of you who benefit and there are others who would do better if I did things differently. There is no way of getting around that. Every judgement you make in life is a question of balancing different interests and ideals. Reasonable good people can disagree on political questions like whether to strike or not, and they can disagree about far more contentious topics also.All this may sound like speaking in platitudes. However it is a point worth making to all of you because you are so young. One of the nice things about being young is that your thinking can be very clear and your mind not so cluttered up with memories and experiences. This clarity can give you a lot of conviction, but it can also lead you astray because you might not yet appreciate just how complicated the world is. As you get older you tend to accumulate life experiences to learn from, and this is the source of wisdom, but the trouble is that the lessons we glean from life do not all point in the same direction. Sometimes it is hard to tease the correct learning from the experiences life throws at us.So what are we to do with the fact that when we are young we lack a lot of the perspective we need to make definitive judgements about what is right, but that as we get older our judgements tend to be informed by our experiences, and these experiences guide us in contradictory ways, both between different people and within the same person?I don’t know.However one thing I do know is that you are not going to be able to avoid making these kinds of judgements, just as I cannot avoid making a judgment about whether to strike or not. Like it or not, I have to make a political choice, and I have to talk to you about it. For me, the choice not to strike is quite easy, but for you the kinds of judgements and choices you are going to face in your lives are going to be far from easy; they are going to be of a complexity and importance that will rival that faced by any previous generation. To an extent that you may not yet appreciate, the world is changing incredibly quickly. In just a decade, since I was your age, the internet and telecommunications has truly transformed the way we live, not just in rich countries but around the world. When I was an undergraduate, if I wanted to check my email I went to a little room in the basement to use a computer, and if I wanted to learn something I went to a library. The kinds of breakthroughs we are seeing in biotechnology remind me of the way people were talking about electricity in 1900. Of course I don’t know - nobody knows - but my guess is that biotechnology in the 21st century could be similarly transformative to the way the full power of electricity only hit prime-time in the 20th century. The recent controversy about the NSA has shown that the role of information technology on society can be, or at least might become, double edged. There is climate change, another controversial and difficult topic, the exact impact of which we do not yet know. These are just a few of the challenges we can see, and we should remember that history has a habit of throwing curve balls at each generation that nobody saw coming. And among all this tumult, our search for common human peace and happiness on some level becomes more difficult, though no less important. A previous generation dodged the bullet of nuclear armageddon when things looked bleak, but for your generation the bullets are coming thicker and faster than ever before. The potential all of you in your generation are going to have for both good and harm is tremendous.I suspect many of you have heard sentiments along these lines before. However I also suspect that many of you will think something in response along the lines of `I know all that, but these things are for someone else to figure out, not me.’That is a mistake.One of the things you can lose track of when you attend a top tier university like Berkeley is just how exceptional and amazing you really are. I’m blown away every time I talk to you. The way you ask penetrating questions, the way you improved so much between midterm 1 and 2, the way you challenge me to be a better teacher, it just knocks my socks off. You really are amazing. I’ve taught students all over the world, and I’ve never seen a group of students so talented. I’m not just talking about some of you. I’m talking about all of you. It’s a privilege to be your professor. Sadly, however, I know many of you don’t feel that way. The difficulty you all face is that as you look around at all your fellow students, it’s easy to have your eye drawn by people doing better than you. Or rather, I should say people who look like they’re doing better than you. In reality the true extent of how much people are learning can be difficult to measure. Sometimes failures and adversity are better preparations for long term success than effortless progress.Why am I telling you all this?I’m telling you this because you all need to know that there is not some great pool of amazing people in some other place who are going to shape the way our species navigates the coming decades. The simple fact is that, like it or not, technology is going to change the way we live in the future, and you’re going to have to solve some very hard problems, as well as figure out how best to use new technology for good, while at the same time facing human dangers that have haunted humanity throughout history.Part of the work of your generation is going to be technological, using scientific ideas to serve the interests of society, and part of the work is going to be fundamentally human, tied inexorably with qualities of the human condition - human emotion - that dominate the whole of history. These things are not separate, but are inexorably linked, and you are in a better place to understand that connection than me.I can’t tell you what your particular role should be in the new realities of the 21st century. It’s up to you to decide if you want to make the focus of your life technological, focused on new innovations to drive society forward, or essentially human, focused on the age-old struggles of trying to get along, work together, and find happiness, or some combination of the two.However I can tell you this:Whatever you decide to do with your life, it’s going to be really, really complicated.Science and technology is complicated. History and politics is complicated. People are complicated. Figuring out how to be happy, and do simple things like take care of our kids and maintain friendships and relationships, is complicated.In order for you to navigate the increasing complexity of the 21st century you need a world-class education, and thankfully you have an opportunity to get one. I don’t just mean the education you get in class, but I mean the education you get in everything you do, every book you read, every conversation you have, every thought you think.You need to optimize your life for learning.You need to live and breath your education.You need to be *obsessed* with your education.Do not fall into the trap of thinking that because you are surrounded by so many dazzlingly smart fellow students that means you’re no good. Nothing could be further from the truth.And do not fall into the trap of thinking that you focusing on your education is a selfish thing. It’s not a selfish thing. It’s the most noble thing you could do.Society is investing in you so that you can help solve the many challenges we are going to face in the coming decades, from profound technological challenges to helping people with the age old search for human happiness and meaning.That is why I am not canceling class tomorrow. Your education is really really important, not just to you, but in a far broader and wider reaching way than I think any of you have yet to fully appreciate.See you tomorrow,Alexander
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)