I bought this second-hand book (cheaply). Admittedly, I was primarily interested in Fay Godwin’s photographs in the book. Her photographs of the Scilly Islands landscape are monumental. However, I find the texts from John Fowles difficult to follow.
The island atmosphere of Fowles’s text reminds me of Tim Robinson‘s books, especially those about the Aran Islands. Tim Robinson’s work provides a lot of detail on the landscape; in this book, Godwin’s photos provide a similar visual detail to Fowles’s meandering texts.
Fowles’s texts follow a historical and mythological sort of baseline. He discusses the characteristics of island communities: solitude and emptiness, independence of any legal power, a unifying feeling that sets people from the islands apart from mainlanders. Islands, withdrawn from common law and ethics, provide a unique magic. Fowles weaves a reasonably diverting story touching many topics. He mixes Homeros’ Odyssey (was it really written by a man, or must this have been a woman) with Joyce’s Ulysses, Shakespeare’s work, historical deviations, Robinson Crusoe, and other Greek mythology.
Being on the private email list of Derek Sivers has some advantages (anyone can be on the list, it is not something elitist, just go here: https://sive.rs/list). One advantage is getting early access to Derek’s new work. How To Live is Derek’s new book, he pointed me to through the email list. I bought it and read it.
As the title suggests, the book is great guidance for life. It is packed with great advice and categorized into 27 topics. The advice is sometimes contradictory, and Derek does not hide that: he gave the book the subtitle “27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion.” And I don’t care either; life is contradictory.
Much of the advice Derek has thought up or gathered in this book may have its origins in Buddhism and Stoicism, and I think it also builds on folks like Nassim Taleb (Antifragile), Kevin Kelly and Seth Godin.
The book is way too dense to summarize in any way. Here are some parts by topic that I found useful for myself.
Be independent.
Instead, do what you’d do if you were the only person on Earth.
Commit.
You and your best friends don’t decide anew daily whether you’re friends or not. You are friends, without question. You’re committed to each other, even if you’ve never said so. That’s what’s wonderful about it. Commit to your habits to make them rituals.
Fill your senses.
Never have the same thought twice.
Do nothing.
Expressing your anger doesn’t relieve it. It makes you angrier. Actions often have the opposite of the intended result. People who try too hard to be liked are annoying.
The stock market takes money from active traders and gives it to the patient.
Think super-long-term.
Imagine your future self judging your current life choices. When deciding, ask yourself how you’ll feel about it when you’re old.
We overestimate what we can do in one year. We underestimate what we can do in ten years. If you take up a new hobby at forty, or whatever age you think is too late, you’ll be an expert by the age of sixty.
Your future self is depending on you. Your descendants depend on you. Our future generations are depending on us. Use the compounding amplifier of time.
Make memories.
Remember them all. Document everything, or you’ll eventually forget it. Nobody can erase your memories, but don’t lose them through neglect. Journal every day.
Turn your experiences into stories. A story is the remains of an experience.
Derek Sivers
Master something.
Pick one thing and spend the rest of your life getting deeper into it. Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status.
Concentrating all of your life’s force on one thing gives you incredible power. Sunlight won’t catch a stick on fire. But if you use a magnifying glass to focus the sunlight on one spot, it will. Mastery needs your full focused attention.
Define “success” for yourself. Describe the outcome you want. You can’t hit a target you can’t see.
You need to understand something very counter-intuitive about goals. Goals don’t improve your future. Goals only improve your present actions. A good goal makes you take action immediately.
Once you get momentum, never stop. It’s easy to continue, but it’s hard to start again if you stop. Never miss a day.
Take tiny breaks when working to go longer than most.
Pursue your mission at the expense of everything else.
You do it for the journey, not the destination.
Let randomness rule.
Let the random generator decide what you do, where you go, and who you meet. Let the random generator make your artistic decisions when doing creative work, shaking up your usual style.
Random stuff happens. All you can control is your response. Every day, you’ll practice reacting to chaos: with dignity, poise, and grace.
Pursue pain.
Comfort is a silent killer. Comfort is quicksand. The softer the chair, the harder it is to get out of it. The right thing to do is never comfortable. How you face pain determines who you are. Be a famous pioneer.
This is the power of the pioneer: to enable the impossible, to open a new world of possibility, to show others that they can do it too, and to take it even further.
Chase the future.
Work as a futurist and technology journalist. Stay on the cutting edge of things so new they barely exist.
Old friends and family see you as you used to be and unintentionally discourage your growth.
The longer something lasts, the longer it will probably last.
The world of news is noisy because they have to hype it.
Learn.
Get out of your room and try a new skill in the real world. Go to the physical place where it’s happening, and put your ass on the line with something to lose. A vivid, visceral feeling of danger will teach you better than words.
Follow the great book.
Rules must be absolutely unbreakable. If you try to decide, each time, whether it’s OK to break the rule or not, then you’ve missed the whole point of rules.
Discipline turns intentions into action. Discipline means no procrastination. Discipline means now.
Choose the pain of discipline, not the pain of regret. Self-control is always rewarding.
Laugh at life.
They win by being playful, creative, adaptive, irreverent, and unbound by norms.
Comedy is tragedy plus time. Time belittles anything by showing it’s not as bad as it seemed. Humor does that instantly.
Prepare for the worst.
Vividly imagine the worst scenarios until they feel real (Seneca, of course). Accepting them is the ultimate happiness and security. Realize that the worst is not that bad.
Live for others.
The best marketing is considerate, and the best sales approach is listening. Serve your clients’ needs, not your own. When done right, business is generous and focused on others. It draws you out of yourself and puts you in service of humanity.
The most extreme version of living for others is becoming famous. Do everything in public, for the public. Share everything you do, even though it’s extra work.
Get rich.
Money is nothing more than a neutral exchange of value. Making money is proof you’re adding value to people’s lives.
Create your own business. Come up with a brand name that can be attached to any business. (Perhaps it’s your name.) Use it for the rest of your life on everything of quality. A recognized brand can charge a premium price, earning more than unrecognized names.
Use other people’s ideas. Ideas are worth almost nothing. Execution is everything.
Be separate—in a category of your own.
Nothing destroys money faster than seeking status. Don’t show off.
I met this young salesman. He had a good year. From the bonus, he bought his wife a Landrover for shopping. The car cost him more than 2000 euros per month. Quickly, he realized his mistake and sold the car, 10,000 down.
You only need to get rich once. When you win a game, you stop playing. Don’t be the dragon in the mountain, just sitting on your gold. Don’t lose momentum in life. Once you’ve done it, take it with you and do something else.
Reinvent yourself regularly.
Your past is not your future. Whatever happened before has nothing at all to do with what happens next. There is no consistency. Nothing is congruent. Never believe a story.
At every little decision, ten times a day, choose the thing you haven’t tried. Act out of character. It’s liberating. Get your security not from being an anchor but from being able to ride the waves of change.
Break down the walls that separate you from others and prevent real connections. Take off your sunglasses. Don’t text when you should talk.
The hardest part of connecting with someone is being honest.
Notice how you feel around people. Notice who brings out the best in you. Notice who makes you feel more connected to yourself—more open and honest.
Create.
Calling yourself creative doesn’t make it true. All that matters is what you’ve launched. Make finishing your top priority. Suspend all judgment when creating the first draft. Just get to the end.
Most of what you make will be fertilizer for the few that turn out great. But you won’t know which is which until afterward. Keep creating as much as you can.
Stay in situations where you’re forced to show your work to others.
Keep a counterweight job. Something effortless that covers your bills. Something you can do a few hours per day but otherwise not think about. It gives discipline and regularity to your life. It gives deadlines and freedom to your art.
Let the deadline of death drive you. Create until your last breath.
Don’t die.
Avoiding failure leads to success. The winner is usually the one who makes the least mistakes. This is true in investing, extreme skiing, business, flying, and many other fields. Win by not losing.
Most of eating healthy means just avoiding lousy food. Most of being right is just not being wrong. To have good people in your life, just cut out the bad ones.
Make a million mistakes.
People who avoid mistakes are fragile, like the robot that only walks. Your million mistakes will make you someone that can’t be knocked down.
Make change.
Don’t accept anything as-is. Everything you encounter must change. Preservation is your enemy. Only dead fish go with the flow. Begin by righting what’s wrong. Look for what’s ugly: ugly systems, ugly rules, ugly traditions. Look for what bothers you.
If you can fix it now, do it. Otherwise, aim lower until you find something you can do now. Make it how it should be. Don’t worship your heroes. Surpass them.
Balance everything.
All bad things in life come from extremes. Too much of this. Too little of that.
When you’re balanced, you’re unlikely to get stressed. You’ve got a stronger foundation and a resilient structure. You can handle surprises and make time for what’s needed.
Schedule everything to ensure a balance of your time and effort. Scheduling prevents procrastination, distraction, and obsession. Even creative work needs scheduling. The greatest writers and artists didn’t wait for inspiration. They kept a strict daily schedule for creating their art.
As said, these are the things I found important. The book is full of things for you. You can get the book through Derek’s site: https://sive.rs/.
I read The Salt Path and immediately bought its sequel, Wild Silence. I read Wild Silence in the same breath as I had read The Salt Path.
I cried a little. I never cry reading books. But it was so good.
Raynor continues her story after a lucky finish of walking the coastal path and finding a friend who could rent a small house for Winn and her husband. Moth is studying in his old age, but his disease seems to be getting hold of him now.
I closed the book, overwhelmed with the sadness of the thought that the day would come when Moth couldn’t remember what we did. The day when CBD had crept so far that the clear, magical, wild experience we’d shared was lost to him forever and I’d be left alone with the memory. The day when the guidebook would be the only record that our walk had ever happened. Where the hell was he?
As a last resort to retain their shared memories, she wrote the story of the coastal path as a present for her husband.
‘What is this? Is this what you’ve been doing?’ ‘Yeah, I’ve been writing it for you.’ I felt shy and nervous, as if it was the first present I’d ever given him. ‘All that time and it was for me.’ ‘It’s the path, the book of our path. So you can always keep the memory.’
Raynor and Moth
Even more than in The Salt Path itself, Winn’s detailed descriptions of nature and surroundings remind me of the beautiful, rigorous details that Tim Robinson uses in his books.
Following the coastal path down from the skylark fields, through the gorse, to the steep dip in the land where winter storms funnel high winds into a jet-powered blast of air, making it hard to stay on your feet.
Many threads run through the books, including Moth’s health, Raynor’s shyness, the death of her dominant mother, the development of a writer, and Raynor’s love for Moth. These could make the reading cheesy, but that never happens.
Don’t ‘be careful on the stairs’, run up them, run as fast as you can, with no fear of clocks ticking or time passing. Nothing can be measured in time, only change, and change is always within our grasp, always simply a matter of choice. I closed my eyes and let the sounds come, let the voice come.
My wife and I spent our holidays in Cornwall a few years ago. We traveled from the north through Plymouth to the south of Cornwall and back up to Minehead, passing places named Lizard’s End, Mousehole, and Land’s End. We walked parts of the Coastal Path. The landscape is rough and beautiful.
I got a novel about this area, The Salt Path, a week ago. It has become a famous book. I read it on the back and then on the Internet. I loved the book. Immediately after finishing it, I bought its sequel, Wild Silence.
In The Salt Path, Raynor Winn tells how she and her husband walk the coastal path of Cornwall that I had seen parts of that summer. They follow Paddy Dillon, a travel writer and experienced hiker who followed the path a few decades before them. Dillon wrote a book about his trip, South West Coast Path—Plymouth to Poole.
Winn and her husband Moth have just gone bankrupt and lost their house to an untruthful friend, and Moth has been diagnosed with an incurable disease of the nerve system.
Their view of life changes as they follow the path. Strangely, Walking seems to improve Moth’s health.
I was thinking how to formulate what it is that makes the stories in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? so special. It may be the way Carver tells a story without making a point. Something is in the air but you don’t know what it is. Maybe it is similar to Haruki Murakami‘s work, in that sense. Nothing is happening, but something is. Carver walks around it. You sense something. It becomes increasingly clear that there is something. But what?
Photo-nerd PS: the picture on the cover of the book is by Todd Hido.
Abandoning a Cat / Een kat achterlaten is a beautiful book in which Murakami writes about his father. Now and then you can see typical Murakami themes peek through the memories he recounts. The somewhat lost men, a confusing war in the far away and way too large China, socially awkward persons, … much food for the close Murakami reader. Very well-designed Dutch edition, bound in Japanese manner, magnificently illustrated by Marion Vrijburg.
You can’t put this down, I read somewhere before acquiring this book.
Indeed.
Much has already been written about this classic comic Maus by Art Spiegelman; just adding I love it and indeed couldn’t put it down. Two volumes straight.
I was not just a little annoyed when I finished A Curious Mind. I wrote a summary on the title page: “Summary: Be curious and do a lot of names-dropping.”
The book is quite entertaining but far from the books that normally get a #1 New York Times bestseller.
Grazer tells us about his curiosity process: his inexhaustible drive to visit people he admires, mostly very famous people, and have inquisitive conversations with them. (Except with Edward Teller, one of the inventors of the hydrogen bomb, who does not want to talk to Grazer and it portrayed as a single minded unpleasant person.)
A huge pile of names-dropping forms the basis of Grazer’s stories. He meets the greats of the world and all of them becomes his friends. It is annoying at page 30, and becomes unbearable throughout the rest of the book.
If you are interested in movies and Hollywood, you may find it all interesting, but for someone searching for the curiosity learnings it is hard to digest.
Curiosity gives meaning to life. It makes you pay attention to others. I gives you a determination to act.
Neuromancer is an unavoidable read. A classic. The beginning of the books reminds me immediately of the first scene of Bladerunner. The Sprawl indeed is referenced by Sonic Youth (The Sprawl on Daydream Nation) – I had read somewhere they were influenced by the cyberpunk writers.
Where is the beauty in these fabricated, technology-dominated futuristic worlds? Societies dominated by drugs, tech, criminals, violence.
An amazing book, forward referencing many SF movies that followed. The creators of The Matrix heavily borrowed from Neuromancer, just to mention one.
Catching the Big Fish is such a great book. It consists of small stories about ideas, meditation, creativity, film making and other things in David Lynch‘s film making life. The tone is wonderfully light. Condensed advice for the living. It is a massive source for inspirational quotes, and I just thumbed through to get to these.
Sometimes restrictions get the mind going. If you’ve tons and tons of money, you may relax and figure you can throw money at any problem that comes along. You don’t have to think so hard. But if you have limitations, sometimes, you com up with very creative, inexpensive ideas.
Little fish swim on the surface, but the big ones swim down below. If you can expand the container you’re fishing in – your consciousness – you can catch bigger fish.
It would be great if the entire film came all at once. But it comes, for me, in fragments. The first fragment is like the Rosetta stone. It’s the piece of the puzzle that indicates the rest. It’s the hopeful puzzle piece.
In Blue Velvet, it was red lips, green lawn, and the song – Bobby Vinton’s version of “Blue Velvet”. The next thing was an ear lying in a field. And that was it.
