You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.
– Niel Gaiman “Where do you get your ideas?” (1997)

Response: I once had a professor of mine who told me that “it is all bullshit, unless you write it down.” Everyone has great and terrible ideas but they never ripen unless we engage with them. Taking on an idea and following through with it is a frightening, difficult and amazing thing. Just becoming aware of the power ideas have when we work with them is the first step in doing something great.

“My mission in life is to make everybody as uneasy as possible. I think we should all be as uneasy as possible, because that’s what the world is like.”
–Edward Gorey, Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey (2002)

Response: I spend a lot of my life trying to shy away from uneasiness. I had the feeling of being unbalanced in some indescribable way, but maybe instead of trying to rid myself of that feeling I need to accept it. The world is difficult, why should our lives be easy? Being human means doing work, the work of being human, which consumes our day even when we are not at the office. What would happen if we radically accepted unease in our lives?

Where Go the Boats?

Dark brown is the river,
Golden is the sand.
It flows along for ever,
With trees on either hand.

Green leaves a-floating,
Castles of the foam,
Boats of mine a-boating–
Where will all come home?

On goes the river
And out past the mill,
Away down the valley,
Away down the hill.

Away down the river,
A hundred miles or more,
Other little children
Shall bring my boats ashore.
–Robert Louis Stevenson (1885)

Response: In our lives we are constantly letting go of something and hoping others find it. Last month I set some flowers on a frozen river and now each time I pass it, I wonder, did they sink? did they sail downstream? or did someone else find them and wonder what they meant? It doesn’t necessarily matter what actual happens, as long as we can imagine it.

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew each other. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.
– Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980)

Response: I am currently overwhelmed by the world of books. It feels as if ideas are multiplying and growing and taking over more and more space in my house. This seems to be the magic of ideas in written form, the good ones continuing living, changing, getting reworked and revised for a new time. How do we even begin to add our own marks to high and aged ideas when there always seems like something new to read?

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it.
–Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Archibald Stuart,(1791)

Response: What does it mean to live in a “free” country or be a “free” person? In many societies, we like to think we are free to do as we wish, but what other factors are at play? What are the costs of liberty and how do we pay them? I don’t have answers, just questions.

Some people say, “How can you live without knowing?” I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know.
–Richard Feynman,The Meaning of It All (1999)

Response: I find myself often uncomfortable in the act of unknowning. We have very little ability to talk about what is not known without referencing what is known. And yet, one could argue, that our thread of collective knowledge is quite tiny within the universe; perhaps many questions of our world are not meant for answers but just designed to make us think and explore our own act of knowing.

Image:Dunhuang star map of 700 AD, held at the British Library

Jack: That, my dear Algy, is the whole truth pure and simple.
Algernon: The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!
– Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Ernest (1895)

Response: When thinking about personal truths, I find that mine is continuously shifting. My memory, my values, my person are always similar but never the same. And yet many times we expect other people to remain unchanging in their views and representation. What would be a way to incorporate these shifting truths into a better understanding of human “nature?”

You can never do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men (1850)

Response: We make our time and our choices. Sometimes, afterwords, I might look back and think, “I should have…” but it is too late, I can only learn from that for the future. We often forget the fragility of life and of ourselves, so instead of saying you will do it tomorrow, practice it today.

Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.
–Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

Response: Love is not just the event of a day or a week, but a continual process. Our actions, our words, our thoughts, our beings are all active in practicing love on a daily basis, even when we don’t realize it. I know the critiques of Valentine’s day, but I like to think of it as a day where we unearth the things we normally do, to remind ourselves of the work of love and appreciate our loved ones.

Picture today is a lithograph from Gray’s Anatomy (1918)

To be loved, be lovable.
–Ovid, Ars Amatoria

Response: If you want to be loved, open yourself up to love from all places. Let yourself absorb the love of the world, make yourself amenable to love, and love yourself as you would others. Love love. What does it mean to you if you try to make yourself more lovable?