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The only way out of suffering, as Robert Frost said, is through it. We don’t run away from the bull, we take it by the horns. Because ultimately, we perform at our best when we’re not suffering, so we all have a vested interest in committing to a journey of self-discovery, no matter how challenging or uncomfortable it makes us.
The Mindful Athlete
George Mumford and Phil Jackson
Huey’s intellect was greater than the old curmudgeon’s; he seized equal time to lay his Share Our Wealth program before a nationwide radio audience. Fortunes would be limited to five million dollars. No one’s annual income could be greater than $1,800,000 or less than $2,000. Provisions would be made for old-age pensions, bonuses for veterans, and cheap food through AAA surpluses. Children would receive a free education from kindergarten through college. Every family would be entitled to a $6,000 homestead grant and a radio, an automobile, and a washing machine. In their one foray outside Louisiana, members of Huey’s Share Our Wealth clubs (there were no dues) had elected Mrs. Hattie W. Caraway to fill out her dead husband’s Arkansas Senate seat. Now Huey’s catchy ditty could be heard in slums all over the country: Every man a king, every man a king, For you can be a millionaire But there’s something belongs to others. There’s enough for all people to share. When it’s sunny June and December too Or in the wintertime or spring There’ll be peace without end Every neighbor a friend With every man a king. To Forrest Davis, author of Huey Long: A Candid Biography, the Kingfish confided that he intended to outlaw the Democratic and Republican parties and serve four terms “as the dictator of this country.” Throughout that spring and summer his popularity snowballed to frightening size. Turner Catledge of the New York Times felt that the administration had blundered in striking back at him; its replies had “probably transformed Huey Long from a clown into a real political menace.” The Democratic National Committee conducted a secret poll showing that Huey, running for the Presidency on a third-party ticket, might take four million votes away from Roosevelt and capture enough key states to throw the 1936 election into the House. Jim Farley, the country’s most
The Glory and the Dream
William Manchester
Darwin was suggesting an idea even larger than natural selection: that the universe is governed by laws, not by divine whim, and that the transmutation of species by natural selection is merely one of those laws. He finished the rough sketch with a burst of eloquence. It was oddly consoling, Darwin noted, that from the hard Malthusian struggle involving “death, famine, rapine, and the concealed war of nature” had come a great good, the creation of the higher animals. “There is a simple grandeur,” he wrote, in the view of life with its powers of growth, assimilation and reproduction, being originally breathed into matter under one or a few forms, and that whilst this our planet has gone circling on according to fixed laws, and land and water, in a cycle of change, have gone on replacing each other, that from so simple an origin, through the process of gradual selection of infinitesimal changes, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been evolved. He had made a big move toward putting his thoughts forward. But it was only a private memo to himself.
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin
David Quammen
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