Kurt at Cultural Offering lists the nine books that made him.
It’s an impressive list and an interesting challenge. I’m still working on my list.
Enjoy the cultural offering, here.
Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash
Category: Uncategorized
My inner weather doesn’t know what’s going on outside. It doesn’t care. It operates by its own meteorological laws.
From his Writing Wednesdays series, Steven Pressfield offers sage advice.
It reminds me of a passage in Meditations (4.3):
“People try to get away from it all – to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish that you could too. Which is idiotic: you can always get away from it anytime you like.
By going within.
Nowhere you can go is more peaceful – more free of interruptions – than your own soul.”
Check out Steven’s advice, here.
As the super-rich leave, the welfare bill balloons and a nicely turned phrase – “Our national security can’t come at the expense of social security” – betrays priorities, it may be worth revisiting Ayn Rand’s 1957 classic Atlas Shrugged.
The book has sold around 10 million copies, although data is lacking on how many have actually read it. At 1,100 words of occasionally turgid prose, it’s not the easiest read (its philosophical heart is a 70-page speech), but right from the start, it attracted passionate supporters. Today, a signed, first edition will cost you £12,000 (according to AbeBooks).
Despite its length and leaden moments, Atlas Shrugged is a deliberately compelling story with a strong and independent woman, Dagny Taggart, as the protagonist fighting to save her business against an appropriation by an over-bearing government. There’s mystery and passion along the way because, as Rand herself wrote,
“It’s time we realize—as the Reds do—that spreading our ideas in the form of fiction is a great weapon, because it arouses the public to an emotional, as well as intellectual response to our cause.”
The challenge was, as biographer Jennifer Burns writes in Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right:
“Rand’s romantic fiction, with its heavy political messages and overdrawn contrasts between good and evil, was hopelessly out of fashion as a vehicle for serious ideas. Atlas Shrugged was a throwback to Socialist realism, with its cardboard characters in the service of an overarching ideology”
Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, Jennifer Burns (p178)
Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, for which Atlas Shrugged is the fictional vehicle, has also attracted passionate apostles and detractors. At times it comes across as an extreme and over-wrought reading of Adam Smith’s invisible hand.
From Smith’s:
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”
We get Rand’s
“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” (p680)
But read the book and what shines through isn’t an extreme philosophy but simple, rational economics: if you squeeze ever harder on the producers, the creatives, the wealth creators, they will stop working. They will go on strike as in Atlas Shrugged, they will emigrate or will simply decide that there is no marginal benefit in working harder.
That’s a lesson we appear to be re-learning, today.
UK beware.
Photo by Siddhant Kumar on Unsplash
Money invested early and left alone compounds; money invested late has to work much harder.
From Nicholas Bate’s TL;DR 5: How to Build Your Wealth (130 words).
Succinct, and profound and part of a series.
Photo by micheile henderson on Unsplash
Author, psychotherapist, coach, trainer and Stoic Donald Robertson offers seven strategies for living in accord with your values.
Most of the time, when people feel a lack of value in their lives, it’s because they’ve become too absorbed in outcome-oriented goals, which are not entirely under their control, and to the neglect of process-oriented goals, such as the virtues.
The article describes high-level strategies that can help people identify and develop the core values, or virtues, by which wish to live: reading, writing, reminders and more.
Read the full list and details, here.
Robertson is, of course, the author of a fine biography of Marcus Aurelius and the Stoic guide How to Live Like a Roman Emperor, along with many other titles.
Photo by Hannah Gibbs on Unsplash (Borrowing Donald’s choice of image as it seems so apt.)
The simple joy in discovering a new word.
Enfilade: a suite of rooms with doorways in line with each other.
I didn’t know. So, here are some enfilades borrowed from Tumblr…
Here’s an essential reminder for these strange times (courtesy of the Adam Smith Institute):
No one at all is looking at UK government policy and deciding that oooooh, no, we don’t like that, we’ll punish them into not doing it. … There are no vigilantes, just people trying to decide what your promises will do to the value of money and thus home in on the price at which you can have some of their money.”
Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash
Only slightly mixed feelings last Friday as I said farewell to five of my guitars.
I haven’t played properly in a few years and, for most of those years, I had been telling myself, “You’re a writer. You could weave the most compelling story for each and sell them on eBay or Reverb.” Instead, they hung or lounged around my office collecting dust and muttering at me with their dead and unplayed strings.
Then, three things happened. I tidied and redecorated my office, resulting in the instruments huddling all together in one corner, looking at me ever more balefully. They deserved to be played. They deserved a better home.
Then, my old guitar tutor popped up on email. We hadn’t spoken in years and, in the course of the exchange he said “you only need two guitars: an electric and an acoustic.”
Now, in my dreams, once I had started to play again and reached some level of passable competence, I have (not had) always promised myself a 1964 Fender Stratocaster. Not investment grade, a well-loved “player’s” guitar would do as long as it’s original in the important places. So I regularly receive emails from No.Tom Guitars, a vintage specialist on London’s Denmark Street (and, in fact, the shop that features in the TV detective series Strike).
This time, their monthly mail of delicious objects had a footnote: “We want your old guitars.”
The upshot is that I sold five to the very nice Mr No Tom, and kept two; my 1981 Tokai Springy Sound ST-80 (if you know, you know – it’s a dream of a guitar with all the classic Strat bark and jangle) and my Yamaha APX electro-acoustic. What’s more, because I didn’t want to be embarrassed on collection day, I braved the ouchy fingers and managed to pull together a half-passable Sweet Home Alabama, just in case.
And I have new strings.
I feel lighter in every way (except my bank account).
And, if you feel you missed out, four of the guitars are here:
1980 Tokai Springy Sound ST-60
2007 Fender Classic Players 60s Stratocaster
Fascinating. I’ve just finished Execupundit Michael Wade’s new novel, Pilate’s Magician.
Julian Fabius is a prominent Roman lawyer living in self-imposed exile from the Emperor Tiberius. The novel explores the dilemma he faces when summoned to support the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate. How do you make sense of an unlikely local tale? And, how do you tell the powerful prefect an unpalatable truth? A lawyerly mind strips away the impossible to arrive at an unlikely truth.
I suspect the book draws as heavily on Michael’s experience as an adviser on sensitive issues as it does on his extensive research. A fresh and entertaining perspective on a familiar tale.