The Bed of Procrustes Read Free Page B

Mediterranean weather; but they go to Spain because their free hours aren’t free.
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    For most, work and what comes with it have the eroding effect of chronic injury.
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    Technology is at its best when it is invisible.
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    The difference between true life and modern life equals the one between a conversation and bilateral recitations.
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    When I look at people on treadmills I wonder how alpha lions, the strongest, expend the least amount of energy, sleeping twenty hours a day; others hunt for them.
Caesar pontem fecit
. *
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    Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health.
    * Literally, “Caesar built a bridge,” but the subtlety is that it can also suggest that “he had a bridge built for him.”

THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS
    Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.
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    Most people write so they can remember things; I write to forget.
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    What they call philosophy I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; what they call journalism I call gossip; and what they call gossip I call (generously) voyeurism.
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    Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered.
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    Critics may appear to blame the author for not writing the book they wanted to read; but in truth they are blaming him for writing the book they wanted, but were unable, to write.
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    Literature is not about promoting qualities, rather, airbrushing (your) defects.
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    For pleasure, read one chapter by Nabokov. For punishment, two.
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    There is a distinction between expressive hypochondria and literature, just as there is one between self-help and philosophy.
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    You need to keep reminding yourself of the obvious: charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control silence.
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    No author should be considered as having failed until he starts teaching others about writing.
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    Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.
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    A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
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    Just as there are authors who enjoy having written and others who enjoy writing, there are books you enjoy reading and others you enjoy having read.
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    A genius is someone with flaws harder to imitate than his qualities.
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    With regular books, read the text and skip the footnotes; with those written by academics, read the footnotes and skip the text; and with business books, skip both the text and the footnotes.
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    Double a man’s erudition; you will halve his citations.
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    Losers, when commenting on the works of someone patently more impressive, feel obligated to unnecessarily bring down their subject by expressing what he is not (“he is not a genius, but …”; “while he is no Leonardo …”) instead of expressing what he is.
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    You are alive in inverse proportion to the density of clichés in your writing.
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    What we call “business books” is an eliminative category invented by bookstores for writings that have no depth, no style, no empirical rigor, and no linguistic sophistication.
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    Just like poets and artists, bureaucrats are born, not made; it takes normal humans extraordinary effort to keep attention on such boring tasks.
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    The costs of specialization: architects build to impress other architects; models are thin to impress other models; academics write to impress other academics; filmmakers try to impress other filmmakers; painters impress art dealers; but authors who write to impress book editors tend to fail.
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    It is a waste of emotions to answer critics; better to stay in print long after they are dead.
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    I can predict when an author is about to plagiarize me, and poorly so when he