Notes to Self
Homework in my quest to read and write better.
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I had a remarkable week. I remember it still. My 'still life' on Submittable transformed, a touch of green appeared where none existed before. For this, and for the London Writer's Salon, I feel gratitude. Not all scrolling proves wasteful. This newsletter (more like a personal reading journal) and the LWS Substack have helped me improve my writing in barely six weeks. I'm so excited to join their community. This piece of mine - thought, written, rewritten, edited with clumsy hands, somehow won the weekly contest. I can hardly believe it! My story about tea brings back my family, my dear baa, gone three years this month. The wound remains open. I never healed, probably never will. Fully at least. Like Jean Rhys, who once quoted that popular song "I'm Going to Lock My Heart and Throw Away the Key," I understand that complex emotional amputation to protect oneself from overwhelming grief. But I cannot lock away my baa, and don't wish to. Her absence follows me like a shadow, lengthening at dusk. Something in her memory is always present at four o'clock, my tea break, and it is something I still enjoy every Sunday. I've been reading Franklin's autobiography as a follow-up to last week's show and it's surprisingly riveting - informal, casual, and sharp. I tried the free audiobook on Amazon but struggled, as always, to absorb books that way. I can't seem to savor the words, and my recall suffers. Oddly, I don't have that issue with podcasts. Maybe it's the editing - books go through layers of refinement, while podcasts rely more on the listener to filter (generally)! A little too close to home (as I check how many domains I've purchased and newsletters I've set up), from Poor Richard's: He is a Governor that governs his Passions, and he a Servant that serves them On persuasion, from the autobiography: ...retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced any thing that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken. This habit, I believe, has been of great advantage to me when I have had occasion to inculcate my opinions, and persuade men into measures that I have been from time to time engaged in promoting; and, as the chief ends of conversation are to inform or to be informed, to please or to persuade, I wish well-meaning, sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good by a positive, assuming manner, that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create opposition, and to defeat every one of those purposes for which speech was given to us, to wit, giving or receiving information or pleasure. and Franklin's own epitaph that he wrote himself in 1728, The Body of B. Franklin, Printer; Like the Cover of an old Book, Its Contents torn out, And stript of its Lettering and Gilding, Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost: For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more, In a new & more perfect Edition, Corrected and amended By the Author. He was born Jan. 6. 1706. Setting up my own Substack, Accidental Sagacity - naturally, I spent more time making a GIF for the publication photo than writing the first letter (or even a note). At least it's a cute GIF at least! While scrolling the Public Domain Archive, I found a beautiful illustration from Le diverse et artificiose machine by Agostino Ramelli (1588) - a multitasking reader from the past, doing exactly what I am now... Revisited my notes from The Pleasures of Reading in An Age of Distraction, and the Serendip chapter still feels transformative. That's where I first traced the rich, winding history of the word - from its Persian roots in the Three Princes of Serendip story by Amīr Khusrau as part of his book The Eight Paradises (1302!) to its Italian retelling nearly two centuries later Peregrinaggio di tre giovani figliuoli del re di Serendippo by Michele Tramezzino(1557), to Horace Walpole's coining of the word in English after reading the "fairy tale". I once read a silly fairy tale, called ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’ ”— Serendip being an old name for Sri Lanka: “as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of...(for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this description).
-Horace Walpole
You can even become a disciple of serendipity. In the literature of the Middle Ages, we see reverence for the goddess Fortuna—fortune, chance—and to worship her is a religious way of shrugging: an admission of helplessness, an acknowledgment of all that lies beyond our powers of control. But in the very idea of serendipity is a kind of hope, even an expectation, that we can turn the accidents of fortune to good account, and make of them some knowledge that would have been inaccessible to us if we had done no more than find what we were looking for.
-Alan Jacobs
I hope to uncover my own discoveries, through curious searching and unaccounted paths, in the new letter. |
Notes to Self
Homework in my quest to read and write better.