Nice metaphors
The writer knows her field - what has been done, what could be done, the limits - the way a tennis player knows the court. And like that expert, she, too, plays the edges. That is where the exhilaration is. She hits up the line.
At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.
PKM systems promise coherence, but they often deliver a kind of abstracted confusion. The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it - and move on. But the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.
COME HELMET OR HIGH WATER
When I played Little League baseball for a few disastrous years, my least favorite part was going up to bat, because you had to wear one of these ratty old batting helmets supplied by the local rec department. None of them fit right, and they all smelled like a hundred sweaty 10-year-olds had worn them before you, because a hundred sweaty 10-year-olds had worn them before you. And so every at-bat carried not only the risk of striking out, but also the risk of contracting head lice.2
A few kids, the serious ones, brought their own helmets—custom fitted, tastefully decorated with decals, and presumably containing zero lice. These kids ran the bases like little princes. Any errant pitches bounced harmlessly off their heads, leaving their perfect skulls un-dented. The outfielders would perk up whenever a kid with a bespoke helmet stepped up to the plate, all of them thinking to themselves, this kid might actually hit the ball.
I say all this because incentives are like batting helmets: if you don’t bring your own, you’ll have to use the crappy ones that are provided for you.
A critical part of human development—in fact, the most human part of human development—is to acquire a purpose. That means refining your sense of right and wrong and figuring out how you, personally, can increase the right and decrease the wrong. Once your neural tube has ballooned into a brain, once you can poop without issue, conjugate irregular verbs, and feed yourself solid foods, you ought to ask yourself, “Why am I doing these things?” What’s it all for? How can I make myself useful?
He went down more slowly than any fighter had ever gone down, he went down like a large ship which turns in end and slides second by second into its grave. As he went down, the sound of Griffith’s punches echoed in the mind like heavy ax in the distance chopping into a wet log.
The sinking ship metaphor made me picture the boxer dropping down in slow motion. The ax metaphor is interesting because while I thought I can imagine how punches sound, I couldn’t, and I could imagine the ax sound better.
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life’s as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.
My attention feels like dandelion seeds scattered to the winds, each branching into new territory rather than deepening its roots.
At first, I assumed that Cy was basically just a smaller version of Knox. That he, too, in time, would do all the same Knox stuff. A new model of the same device. It took me longer than it should’ve to realize he was someone else entirely.