Once considered an art form that called for talent, or at least a craft that called for practice, a poem now needs only sincerity. Everyone, we’re assured, is a poet. Writing poetry is good for us. It expresses our inmost feelings, which is wholesome. Reading other people’s poems is pointless since those aren’t our own inmost feelings. Help us to share this great article. Your friends will appreciate it! 0share Facebook0 Twitter0 Pinterest0 LinkedIn0 Flipboard Tumblr0 Mix
No doubt about it, solitude is improved by being voluntary. Help us to share this great article. Your friends will appreciate it! 0share Facebook0 Twitter0 Pinterest0 LinkedIn0 Flipboard Tumblr0 Mix
Coaches and headmasters praise sport as a preparation for the great game of life, but this is absurd. Nothing could be more different from life. For one thing sports, unlike life, are played according to rules. Indeed, the rules are the sport: life may behave bizarrely and still be life, but if the runner circles the bases clockwise it’s no longer baseball. Help us to share this great article. Your friends will appreciate it! 0share Facebook0 Twitter0 Pinterest0 LinkedIn0 Flipboard Tumblr0 Mix
We’re a shifty, sliding population. … What we refer to as ‘home’ may be a place we haven’t seen in years; a place where there’s no one left who knows our name. Help us to share this great article. Your friends will appreciate it! 0share Facebook0 Twitter0 Pinterest0 LinkedIn0 Flipboard Tumblr0 Mix
Perhaps it’s a good time to reconsider pleasure at its roots. Changing out of wet shoes and socks, for instance. Help us to share this great article. Your friends will appreciate it! 0share Facebook0 Twitter0 Pinterest0 LinkedIn0 Flipboard Tumblr0 Mix
I was getting sick and tired of being lectured by dear friends with their little bottles of water and their regular visits to the gym. All of a sudden, we’ve got this voluntary prohibition that has to do with health and fitness. I’m not really in favor of health and fitness. Help us to share this great article. Your friends will appreciate it! 0share Facebook0 Twitter0 Pinterest0 LinkedIn0 Flipboard Tumblr0 Mix
In America, snobs who wouldn’t be seen dead with a lottery ticket play the stock market. We like to gamble. Winning, we have closed our eyes, leapt across the yawning abyss, and landed knee-deep in daisies. Even losing has a certain gloomy glamour: the gods of chance are worthy opponents; we have engaged them in hand-to-hand combat and though we lost, at least we shrank not from the contest. Help us to share this great article. Your friends will appreciate it! 0share Facebook0 Twitter0 Pinterest0 LinkedIn0 Flipboard Tumblr0 Mix
For the first time in six or seven thousand years, many people of goodwill find themselves confused about art. They want to enjoy it because enjoying art is something they expect of themselves as civilized persons, but they’re unsure how to do so. They aren’t even sure which of the visible objects are art and which are furniture, clothes, hors d’oeuvres, or construction rubble, and whether a pile of dead and decomposing rats is deliberate art or just another pile of decomposing rats. Help us to share this great article. Your friends will appreciate it! 0share Facebook0 Twitter0 Pinterest0 LinkedIn0 Flipboard Tumblr0 Mix
Very few people have no opinions about cats. Help us to share this great article. Your friends will appreciate it! 0share Facebook0 Twitter0 Pinterest0 LinkedIn0 Flipboard Tumblr0 Mix
Poets and songwriters speak highly of spring as one of the great joys of life in the temperate zone, but in the real world most of spring is disappointing. We looked forward to it too long, and the spring we had in mind in February was warmer and dryer than the actual spring when it finally arrives. We’d expected it to be a whole season, like winter, instead of a handful of separate moments and single afternoons. Help us to share this great article. Your friends will appreciate it! 0share Facebook0 Twitter0 Pinterest0 LinkedIn0 Flipboard Tumblr0 Mix
True ownership of anything requires time. Help us to share this great article. Your friends will appreciate it! 0share Facebook0 Twitter0 Pinterest0 LinkedIn0 Flipboard Tumblr0 Mix
Visiting is a pleasure; being visited is usually a mixed or ambivalent joy. … The visitor can always go home; the visitee is already home, trapped like a rat in a drainpipe. Help us to share this great article. Your friends will appreciate it! 0share Facebook0 Twitter0 Pinterest0 LinkedIn0 Flipboard Tumblr0 Mix
One’s own flowers and some of one’s own vegetables make acceptable, free, self-congratulatory gifts when visiting friends, though giving zucchini – or leaving it on the doorstep, ringing the bell, and running – is a social faux pas. Help us to share this great article. Your friends will appreciate it! 0share Facebook0 Twitter0 Pinterest0 LinkedIn0 Flipboard Tumblr0 Mix
New York was where we wanted to live when we were finally grown up, and drink martinis and stay out past bedtime. Help us to share this great article. Your friends will appreciate it! 0share Facebook0 Twitter0 Pinterest0 LinkedIn0 Flipboard Tumblr0 Mix
Life, after we’d had a few millennia to observe it, turned out to be dreadfully unfair, so we invented sports. Help us to share this great article. Your friends will appreciate it! 0share Facebook0 Twitter0 Pinterest0 LinkedIn0 Flipboard Tumblr0 Mix
A good-looking piece of scenery anywhere delights the eye and elevates the spirits. Some of us, crude creatures that we are, are merely excited; finer souls draw ethical and spiritual nutrients from the sight. Help us to share this great article. Your friends will appreciate it! 0share Facebook0 Twitter0 Pinterest0 LinkedIn0 Flipboard Tumblr0 Mix
The larger the ego, the less the need for other egos around. The more modest, humble, and self-effacing we feel, the more we suffer from solitude, feeling ourselves inadequate company. Help us to share this great article. Your friends will appreciate it! 0share Facebook0 Twitter0 Pinterest0 LinkedIn0 Flipboard Tumblr0 Mix
Sophistication called for a variety of talents and attitudes, but the minimum requirement was being in New York. Not all New Yorkers achieved it, but nobody elsewhere had a prayer. Help us to share this great article. Your friends will appreciate it! 0share Facebook0 Twitter0 Pinterest0 LinkedIn0 Flipboard Tumblr0 Mix
Napping is too luxurious, too sybaritic, too unproductive, and it’s free; pleasures for which we don’t pay make us anxious. Besides, it seems to be a natural inclination. … Fighting off natural inclinations is a major Puritan virtue, and nothing that feels that good can be respectable. Help us to share this great article. Your friends will appreciate it! 0share Facebook0 Twitter0 Pinterest0 LinkedIn0 Flipboard Tumblr0 Mix
The thing to remember is that children are temporary. As soon as they develop a sense of humor and get to be good company, maybe even remember to take the trash out and close the refrigerator door, they pack up their electronic equipment and their clothes, and some of your clothes, and leave in a U-Haul, to return only at Thanksgiving. Help us to share this great article. Your friends will appreciate it! 0share Facebook0 Twitter0 Pinterest0 LinkedIn0 Flipboard Tumblr0 Mix
