Directions

I just ran into one of my former swim students yesterday at the post office. He was from the coast of Senegal and was about to go back for a visit and wanted to be able to swim. I had given him three swim lessons at the RI ATHLETIC club. Standing on the sidewalk I directed him to the Y pool. "GO straight, turn left on Federal street and it's right on your left! Tell them Emily sent me!" He works in Franklin as an engineer and lives in Woonsocket but English is still a new language for him. I hope he found it.

Narcissism is Incurable

Proof

How to Write: 10 Tips from David Ogilvy

“Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well.”

David Ogilvy (1911 – 1999) is frequently referred to as ‘the father of advertising’ or as ‘the original Mad Man’. Ogilvy first worked as a chef, a researcher and as a farmer before launching his own advertising agency in 1949 with just US$6000 in the bank. The Ogilvy Group would become one of the world’s most successful advertising agencies.

In 1982 Ogilvy sent the following memo to all of his agency’s employees:
How to Write

The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well.

Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.

Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:

Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.
Write the way you talk. Naturally.
Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
Never write more than two pages on any subject.
Check your quotations.
Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning — and then edit it.
If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.
Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.
If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.

Source: The Unpublished David Ogilvy (1986)

Zadie Smith

“Writing is my way of expressing – and thereby eliminating – all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.”
– Zadie Smith

George Orwell - Why I Write

“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
– George Orwell

Cormac McCarthy

“I don’t know why I started writing. I don’t know why anybody does it. Maybe they’re bored, or failures at something else.”
– Cormac McCarthy

Anaïs Nin

“Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.” – Anaïs Nin

till you drop off the chair

“I write because I love writing. I think I became a writer in order to explore my ideas and responses to the world around me, which I often found it difficult to share with others. Also I liked my autonomy, and a writer can choose his or her own working hours – midnight to dawn or whenever. The difficulty of becoming a writer never bothered me. I knew it was going to work for me sooner or later. And if you’re a writer you don’t have to retire but can keep on doing the thing you love till you drop off the chair.”
– Alex Miller

Gao Xingjian

“Writing eases my suffering . . . writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.”
– Gao Xingjian

Dahl

“A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.” – Roald Dahl

John Green

“I believe there is hope for us all, even amid the suffering – and maybe even inside the suffering. And that’s why I write fiction, probably. It’s my attempt to keep that fragile strand of radical hope, to build a fire in the darkness.”
– John Green

Gloria E. Anzaldúa

“Why am I compelled to write? . . . Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger . . . To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To dispel the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is not a pile of shit . . . Finally I write because I’m scared of writing, but I’m more scared of not writing.” – Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Carrie Fisher

Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. Just do it and the confidence will follow. CARRIE FISHER

A Year of Service

https://www.wcpo.com/news/insider/poor-on-purpose-what-these-young-adults-learned-from-year-of-service-in-the-west-end

Barking

This morning my dog was barking. I heard something and thought it was cats fighting in the alley. It was a couple arguing on their porch across the street. My Romeo is so sensitive. He was barking over the emotion. Blessed are the peacemakers!

Overcome 'Language Deprivation'

How Educators Are Trying To Overcome 'Language Deprivation' For Deaf Kids

Boston Police Department Commissioner William Evans

At a press conference Monday morning, Evans, who's 59, announced his rumored retirement. He thanked his family, Walsh and the entire police department.

"I'm only as good as the people I lead, and they've done a great job," he said.

“You know, it's been a great ride,” he added. “I've loved every minute. I can't say that I ever got up a day in my career where I haven't wanted to go to work, and I don't think a lot of people can say that.”

Evans will retire from BPD Saturday. He'll become BC's executive director of public safety and chief of police on Monday.

Walsh praised Evans' time on the force and said with him at the helm, Boston police have become a national leader in community policing.

http://www.wbur.org/news/2018/07/23/boston-police-commissioner-evans-to-leave-force-to-head-boston-college-police

Primo Levi

Primo Levi: Survival in Auschwitz

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
― Primo Levi

“...the sea's only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong. Now, I don't know much about the sea, but I do know that that's the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing blind, deaf stone alone, with nothing to help you but your own hands and your own head...”
― Primo Levi

“I am constantly amazed by man's inhumanity to man.”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man / The Truce

“Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

“You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find warm food
And friendly faces when you return home.
Consider if this is a man
Who works in mud,
Who knows no peace,
Who fights for a crust of bread,
Who dies by a yes or no.
Consider if this is a woman
Without hair, without name,
Without the strength to remember,
Empty are her eyes, cold her womb,
Like a frog in winter.
Never forget that this has happened.
Remember these words.
Engrave them in your hearts,
When at home or in the street,
When lying down, when getting up.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your houses be destroyed,
May illness strike you down,
May your offspring turn their faces from you.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

“Even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last — the power to refuse our consent.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

“Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.”
― Primo Levi

“Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who stop to consider the antithesis; that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.”
― Primo Levi

“I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.”
― Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

“This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of me who is writing; and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic minuscule game which nobody has yet described. It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one.”
― Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

“A country is considered the more civilised the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful.”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man / The Truce

“Logic and morality made it impossible to accept an illogical and immoral reality; they engendered a rejection of reality which as a rule led the cultivated man rapidly to despair. But the varieties of the man-animal are innumerable, and I saw and have described men of refined culture, especially if young, throw all this overboard, simplify and barbarize themselves, and survive. A simple man, accustomed not to ask questions of himself, was beyond the reach of the useless torment of asking himself why.

The harsher the oppression, the more widespread among the oppressed is the willingness, with all its infinite nuances and motivations, to collaborate: terror, ideological seduction, servile imitation of the victor, myopic desire for any power whatsoever… Certainly, the greatest responsibility lies with the system, the very structure of the totalitarian state; the concurrent guilt on the part of individual big and small collaborators is always difficult to evaluate… they are the vectors and instruments of the system’s guilt… the room for choices (especially moral choices) was reduced to zero”
― Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

“I live in my house as I live inside my skin: I know more beautiful, more ample, more sturdy and more picturesque skins: but it would seem to me unnatural to exchange them for mine.”
― Primo Levi

“... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once...”
― Primo Levi

“If it is true that there is no greater sorrow than to remember a happy time in a state of misery, it is just as true that calling up a
moment of anguish in a tranquil mood, seated quietly at one's desk, is a source of profound satisfaction.”
― Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

“Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man / The Truce

“The librarian, whom I had never seen before, presided over the library like a watchdog, one of those poor dogs who are deliberately made vicious by being chained up and given little to eat; or better, like the old, toothless cobra, pale because of centuries of darkness, who guards the king's treasure in the Jungle Book. Paglietta, poor woman, was little less than a lusus naturae: she was small, without breasts or hips, waxen, wilted, and monstrously myopic; she wore glasses so thick and concave that, looking at her head-on, her eyes, light blue, almost white, seemed very far away, stuck at the back of her cranium. She gave the impression of never having been young, although she was certainly not more than thirty, and of having been born there, in the shadows, in that vague odor of mildew and stale air.”
― Primo Levi

“He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good”
― Primo Levi

“We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience, we have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.”
― Primo Levi

“An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man / The Truce

“Our ignorance allowed us to live, as you are in the mountains, and your rope is frayed and about to break, but you don't know it and feel safe.”
― Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

“For human nature is such that grief and pain - even simultaneously suffered - do not add up as a whole in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the greater, according to a definite law of perspective. It is providential and is our means of surviving in the camp. And this is the reason why so often in free life one hears it said that man is never content. In fact it is not a question of a human incapacity for a state of absolute happiness, but of an ever-insufficient knowledge of the complex nature of the state of unhappiness; so that the single name of the major cause is given to all its causes, which are composite and set out in an order of urgency. And if the most immediate cause of stress comes to an end, you are grievously amazed to see that another one lies behind; and in reality a whole series of others.

So that as soon as the cold, which throughout the winter had seemed our only enemy, had ceased, we became aware of the hunger; and repeating the same error, we now say: "If it was not for the hunger!...”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man / The Truce

“This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real. Everyone dreamed past and future dreams, of slavery and redemption, of improbable paradises, of equally mythical and improbable enemies; cosmic enemies, perverse and subtle, who pervade everything like the air.”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man / The Truce

“In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that's why you're not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.”
― Primo Levi

“Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we ill have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man / The Truce

“It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, could overwhelm us and our children. One is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close one's mind: this is a temptation one must resist. In fact, the existence of the death squads had a meaning, a message: 'We, the master race, are your destroyers, but you are no better than we are; if we so wish, and we do so wish, we can destroy not only your bodies, but also your souls, just as we have destroyed ours.”
― Primo Levi

“...he never asked nor accepted any reward, because he was good and simple and did not think that one did good for a reward.”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man / The Truce

“Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

Canine Chinese Star

Article

How We Lost the Sky

Opinion

THE STONE
How We Lost the Sky

The space above us, once filled by the human imagination, is now crowded with technologies of surveillance and war.

By Kenneth Weisbrode and Heather H. Yeung

Mr. Weisbrode is a historian. Ms. Yeung is a poet.

July 23, 2018