Thursday, February 13, 2025

Quote of the Day (Larry Bird, on His Drive for Perfection)

“I don't know if I practiced more than anybody, but I sure practiced enough. I still wonder if somebody—somewhere—was practicing more than me.”—NBA Hall of Famer Larry Bird with Bob Ryan, Drive: The Story of My Life (1990)

The image accompanying this post, of the Boston Celtics’ Larry Bird in the 1985 NBA Playoffs Game 2 vs. the Detroit Pistons, was taken by Steve Lipofsky www.Basketballphoto.com.

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Quote of the Day (Virginia Woolf, on a London Winter in Early Evening)

“The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.” —English novelist-essayist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” in The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays (1942)

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Quote of the Day (Marcel Proust, on ‘Memory’s Pictures’)

“How paradoxical it is to seek in reality memory's pictures, which must always lack the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being perceived by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed….The places that we have known do not belong only to the world of space in which we locate them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the remembrance of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”—French novelist Marcel Proust (1870-1922), Swann’s Way (Vol. 1 of In Search of Lost Time), translated by C.K. Moncrieff (1913)

Monday, February 10, 2025

Quote of the Day (Charles Lamb, on ‘The Only True Time’)

“I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true Time, which a man can properly call his own—that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people's Time, not his.”—English essayist, critic, poet, and playwright Charles Lamb (1775-1834), “The Superannuated Man,” in Charles Lamb's Essays (1900)

I first encountered Charles Lamb—born 250 years ago today in London—through the children’s book Tales From Shakespeare, written with his older sister Mary. I wasn’t too impressed with it—and, consequently, him—at the time.

Then I found out that, like his friend William Hazlitt (whose picture of him accompanies this post), he was a talented practitioner of the personal essay—in a sense, the creative ancestor of bloggers like me.

Friends delighted in Lamb’s conversation, and it’s certainly the case that, with a few exceptions, what you see is what you get with him: a droll writer who liked to poke fun at himself, often using pseudonyms (including one for himself: “Elia,” taken from the last name of an Italian friend and fellow clerk).

I highlighted the quote above because, even with the vast changes in business and society that have taken place since the Romantic Era when Lamb wrote, the issues he raised in “The Superannuated Man”—working in a job that doesn’t always satisfy one’s deepest needs, and the proper use of time when employment comes to a definitive end—are ones that aging baby boomers like me are increasingly facing.

Lamb confronted these concerns himself because, family poverty forced him, at age 14, to quit school and start working as a clerk, his principal occupation until, 36 years later, he took his firm’s generous pension offer and retired.

Only a decade remained to the writer before his death. Much of that time was darkened by the growing mental instability of Mary, who had been under his care for three decades following her fit of temporary insanity that led her to fatally stab the Lambs’ mother and wound their father.

Lamb’s life underscores the predicament that so many writers who never achieve strong sales deal with: doing what you must versus what you want. We should all confront these challenges with the same perseverance, equanimity, and grace that Lamb summoned for so long.

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Office,’ on Dunder Mifflin’s ‘Best Manager’)

 

Chris O'Keefe, board member and former congressman [played by Chris Ellis] [after listening to Dunder Mifflin's Michael Scott bloviate]: “He's the best manager? Where's the off button on this moron?” — The Office, Season 6, Episode 11, “Shareholder Meeting,” original air date Nov. 19, 2009, teleplay by Justin Spitzer, directed by Charles McDougall

Like just about everyone who reads this post, I had, over my long professional career, many moments when I (silently) doubted a manager's ability with as much vehemence as O’Keefe.

Lately, I have wished that the “off button” could be pressed on another person in charge, who now has considerably more authority than Michael Scott ever had. But it looks like that won’t happen for a while yet—if it ever will.

Sunday, February 9, 2025

Quote of the Day (Charina Chou, James Manyika, and Hartmut Neven, on the Promise and Peril of Quantum Computing)

“Like other new and powerful technologies, quantum computing [which uses quantum states of subatomic particles to store information and solve complex problems faster than on classical computers] holds enormous promise, and it also introduces significant new risks. In addition to large-scale data theft, economic disruption, and intelligence breaches, quantum computers could be used for malicious purposes such as stimulating and synthesizing chemical weapons or optimizing the flight trajectories of a swarm of drones. As with AI, the possibility of misuse or abuse raises critical questions about who should control the technology and how to mitigate the threats. Policymakers will need to determine how to maximize economic and societal gains while minimizing the dangers. Finding the best ways to achieve this balance will require a rigorous debate within civil society and an understanding by the public of the technology’s potential gains and harms. There are multiple futures for a world with quantum computers. The best one would see liberal democracies leading both the technology's development and its collective management. A worse one would have the United States and its international partners, through inaction or insufficient actions, cede dominance of the new technology to China and other autocratic countries.”— Charina Chou, James Manyika, and Hartmut Neven, “The Race to Lead the Quantum Future,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2025 issue

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Book of Isaiah, As the Prophet’s Lips Are Anointed With Fire)

“I said, ‘Woe is me, I am doomed!
For I am a man of unclean lips,
living among a people of unclean lips;
yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!’
Then one of the seraphim flew to me,
holding an ember that he had taken with tongs from the altar.
 
He touched my mouth with it, and said,
‘See, now that this has touched your lips,
your wickedness is removed, your sin purged.’
 
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying,
‘Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?’
‘Here I am,’ I said; ‘send me!’"—Isaiah 6:5-8
 
The image accompanying this post, Isaiah’s Lips Anointed with Fire, was created in 1772 by the American-born English artist Benjamin West (1738-1820), one of a series of paintings commissioned by King George III to decorate a chapel at Windsor Castle.