a promise of lightning

“What is erotic about reading (or writing) is the play of imagination called forth in the space between you and your object of knowledge. Poets and novelists, like lovers, touch that space to life with their metaphors and subterfuges. The edges of the space are the edges of the things you love, whose inconcinnities make your mind move.”

“Calm and queenly, comes the summer nymph, July—crowned with azure, clothed with splendour,”

“Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe completely, is a collaboration between one’s conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones.”

“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.”