Naming love too early is a beautiful but harrowing human difficulty. Most of our heartbreak comes from attempting to name who or what we love and the way we love, too early in the vulnerable journey of discovery.
We can never know in the beginning, in giving ourselves to a person, to a work, to a marriage or to a cause, exactly what kind of love we are involved with. When we demand a certain specific kind of reciprocation before the revelation has flowered completely we find ourselves disappointed and bereaved and in that grief may miss the particular form of love that is actually possible but that did not meet our initial and too specific expectations. Feeling bereft we take our identity as one who is disappointed in love, our almost proud disappointment preventing us from seeing the lack of reciprocation from the person or the situation as simply a difficult invitation into a deeper and as yet unrecognizable form of affection.
Poet and Philosopher David Whyte on Love and Resisting the Tyranny of Relationship Labels
Europe’s mightiest river is drying up, most likely causing a recession in Germany. Yes, really. Busines Insider
These days, in a cultural sense, the only two pre-1960 singers who still linger in the memory are Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. Bing Crosby, as Terry Teachout recently pointed out in Commentary, has more or less disappeared. A case could be made that, in addition to being one of his era’s most popular singers, Crosby is the single most popular movie star in Hollywood history. Certainly he is in the top ten. Today he survives in the memory of specialists and historians and suchlike boffins. To the broader populace, the words “Bing Crosby” no longer have meaning.
Looking back on his four decades as a movie critic, John Podhoretz points out that even if you go back only to the 1980s, hardly anything survives. People still talk about Back to the Future and Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Princess Bride (but not E.T., the biggest hit of the decade). Rain Man not only swept the Academy Awards in 1988 but was the biggest hit of that year, selling the equivalent of $380 million in tickets in today’s dollars. Bring up that movie in a classroom today and I suspect the reaction will be the same as if you brought up Mickey Rooney or Shirley Temple. Step forward, 1990s movies, and report to the vaporization facility. You’ve got a few years left, but only a few.
As the Who suit up for what I suppose will be their final tour (“Who’s Left”?), Chuck Klosterman points out in his book But What if We’re Wrong? that whole forms die out. He
compares rock to 19th-century marriage hing music: nothing left of the latter except John Philip Sousa. That’s it. And Sousa himself is barely remembered. In 100 years rock might be gone too, Klosterman guesses. Maybe we’ll remember one rock act. Who will it be? Maybe none of the obvious answers. It certainly wasn’t obvious at the time of Fitzgerald’s death that The Great Gatsby would be the best-remembered novel he or anyone else wrote in the first half of the 20th century. As for the novels of the second half of the 20th century, the clock is ticking on them. The Catcher in the Rye is moribund. Generation X was the last to revere that book. Teaching it to young people today would get you ridiculed. To Kill a Mockingbird? It had a good run but it’s now being labeled a “white savior” story by the grandchildren of those who revered it. Soon schools and teachers will be shunning it.
Speaking of The Catcher in the Rye, as Cathy Young noted last week at Quillette, “The Posthumous #MeToo-ing of J. D. Salinger,” is helping to dramatically speed up his once universally known novel’s memory holing, despite this being the 100th birthday of its author.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE: A former prison guard who spent months behind bars for a fake rape has told a court how his ex-partner’s crime nearly drove him to suicide, changed who he was and “shattered” his faith in the legal system.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE: A former prison guard who spent months behind bars for a fake rape has told a court how his ex-partner’s crime nearly drove him to suicide, changed who he was and “shattered” his faith in the legal system.
Routine. The word sends mixed messages. For some “routine” means pedestrian, repetitive, mindless. For others it means structure and increased productivity. However we feel about the word, we all have routines, and the truly successful among us take the time to include in their routine those activities which will enrich their lives and their livelihoods. The routines of high achievers often have things in common. Many are early risers. Most partake of some form of exercise. Few waste their commute and almost all of them read daily. All forms of reading will exercise your mind. Novels will give you a deeper understanding of other people, non-fiction will expand your knowledge of any given topic, newspapers will keep you well-informed on what is happening in the world around you. And really good business content is designed to do all three. Raconteur content builds on the skills and experience of C-level executives, explores the trends and technologies of tomorrow, and keeps you up-to-date with the burning issues facing business today. Written by industry-leading journalists, it is designed to cut through the noise and inspire and challenge business decision-makers and those aspiring to be them. So, why not add us to your routine by signing up for our daily newsletter? Cutting-edge business content and beautifully-designed infographics delivered to you every day. |
