Join 📚 Jim's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Jim's read, .
For a start, a life task **will be something you can accomplish "only by effort and with difficulty,"** as Jung puts it – and specifically, I'd say, with that feeling of "good difficulty" that comes from pushing back against your conditioned preferences for comfort and security.
Find the Life Task
ckarchive.com
Despite conservative fearmongering about student and faculty revolutionaries, the humanities seem to be about as politically powerless as Vonnegut assessed more than 20 years ago. The increasing politicalization of humanities departments over the past decade has occurred in parallel with the increasing radicalization of the right during that same period, and the former has done positively nothing to curtail the latter.
The Humanities Have Sown the Seeds of Their Own Destruction - The Atlantic
Tyler Austin Harper
Critical reflection of some kind is inevitable, so it would behoove us to do it well. The best guide I know to readerly judgment is our old friend Auden, who graciously summed up a lifetime of thinking about these matters in a single incisive sentence: “For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don’t like it; I can see this is good, and, though at present I don’t like it, I believe with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don’t like it.”
The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
Alan Jacobs
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise