The True Task of Culture, Grandpa's Phone Policy, and Physical Notes
Baxter's Blend #3
Hey everyone,
Greetings from Austin!
Last week, I shared the most beautiful painting I’ve ever seen. It’s called The Voyage of Life: Youth by Thomas Cole. I love it so much that I decided to make it part of my new newsletter banner.
New Post: Selfishness = Letting Someone Down
On Monday, I wrote a mini essay about a truth I needed to see put out there: when someone says that you’re selfish, what they’re actually saying is, “you’re not giving me what I want.”
But what’s weird about the word “selfish” is that you can’t be selfish if you’re all by yourself. As I wrote:
“The word ‘selfish’ only exists when we are in the presence of other people. This somehow means that being ‘selfish’ is more about others than ourselves.”
You can read the rest of the post here:
The Odyssey
Right now, I’m still reading the Odyssey. Our culture is so focused on consuming more and more inputs that it feels so weird for me to sit with a book for a full month.
But by reading and rereading, I feel like I’m creating a more firm foundation of knowledge. In the words of Jorge Luis Borges, “Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.”1
The Odyssey is about as ancient as the Bible, so it’s age alone justifies slow reading. Here are three of my favorite quotes from it that you should probably read more than once:
“‘It’s always the latest song, the one that echoes last
in the listeners’ ears, that people praise the most.’”
. . .
“‘Are you a fool, stranger—soft in the head and lazy too?
Or do you let things slide because you like your pain?’”
. . .
“‘Ah how shameless—the way these mortals blame the gods.
From us alone, they say, come all their miseries, yes,
but they themselves, with their own reckless ways,
compound their pains beyond their proper share.’”
The True Task of Culture
On the theme of culture, I found a fascinating quote from 1910:
"The true task of culture to-day is not a task of expansion, but very decidedly of selection—and rejection." - G.K. Chesterton
Grandpa’s Phone Policy
This week I caught up with my maternal grandparents and realized that I need to talk to them more often. Not only will they not be here too much longer, but they also just have interesting perspectives on the world.
One that surprised was how they treat technology. When they leave the house, they don’t take their phone with them. I say “phone” in the singular because they both share one old iPhone that they hardly use.
Most people can’t go for a 20-minute walk without their phone, so I wondered why in the world they think this way.
As my grandpa told me, “No one’s gonna call me on the golf course! And if they do, I’m not answering!”
Seems like my they were born far enough away from the inception of the Internet to still have these strong boundaries for presence and not missing out on their lives.
On Physical Notes
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot more is physical notes. None of the greatest writers in history had Evernote or iCloud. And while they did live in a different time with less information, I still wonder.
What if capturing every idea into our computers actually dilutes truth and taste? After using Ryan Holiday’s notecard system for a while, I’m starting to see that this could be true:
I love Evernote so much, but I am tempted to try out taking all analog notes for a month. I really do wonder if the destroyable nature of the notebook gives it more value—kind of like why Odysseus chooses mortality over eternal youth in Calypso’s sexy cave.
See you next week,
—Baxter
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