a promise of lightning

“Excellence is mundane. Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence. […] there is no secret; there is only the doing of all those little things, each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in every detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit, an ordinary part of one’s everyday life.”

“Hurrying to the end or warming up old ideas will ensure a mediocre results. Leonardo da Vinci understood the dangers of such impatience. He adopted as his motto the expression ostinato rigore, which translated as “stubborn rigour” or “tenacious application.” For every project he involved himself in—and by the end of his life they numbered in the thousands—he repeated this to himself, so he would attack each one with the same vigour and tenacity. The best way to neutralise our natural impatience is to cultivate a kind of pleasure in pain—like an athlete, you come to enjoy rigorous practice, pushing past your limits, and resisting the easy way out.”

“But it was a dream. We were wrapped in cotton, in silk threads, in webs, in moss, in fog, in the sea flavor of distance to be annihilated.”

It was a kind of mutual haunting.

In today's state of hyperactivity, where boredom is not allowed to emerge, we never reach the state of deep mental relaxation. The information society is an age of heightened mental tension, because the essence of information is surprise and the stimulus it provides. The tsunami of information means that our perceptual apparatus is permanently stimulated. It can no longer enter into contemplation. The tsunami of information fragments our attention. It prevents the contemplative lingering that is essential to narrating and careful listening . . . In the process of digitalization, . . . information acquires an altogether different status. Reality itself takes on the form of information and data. For the most part, we perceive reality in terms of information or through the lens of information. Information is an idea—that is, a re-representation. When reality takes the form of information, the immediate experience of presence withers. When digitalization gives everything the form of information, reality is flattened.