Hey Everyone!
Hope you are doing well, in these unsteady times.
Welcome to the zeroth issue of Things Of Note.
In this weekly (for now, every Saturday) newsletter, I will be sharing things I have found interesting and/or useful. I’ll also add in some notes and thoughts in response to or engendered by them.
My personal motivation in writing this is to well... get myself to write more, by creating a forcing function. Another behavior I want to encourage in myself through this is to be more mindful of and make note of the interesting stuff I come across. Or, for that matter, any thing I come across. It's easy to go days and months consuming things--essays, videos, poems, conversations--without synthesizing or even acknowledging them. And at the end, all you have is a feeling of numb emptiness. Where did it all go? That's no fun.
Anyway, hope some of these are interesting and/or useful to you too :)
// Readings
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
Summary by Farnam Street | 10 mins
"You have to live on this 24 hours of time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect and the evolution of your immortal soul. It’s right use… is a matter of the highest urgency”.
We place our value disproportionately more on money than time. Yet it is time that is irreplaceable, fixed, finite. This summary does a great job of not only extracting the key points but also contextualizing the century-old book's thesis to the modern day. A good food-for-thought.
The Running Novelist
Haruki Murakami | 20 mins
This is the story of how Murakami started writing novels (when he was nearly 30) and running (when he was 33).
Origin stories are always fascinating. This one doubly so because he basically started writing on a whim:
"And, pretty much out of the blue, it occurred to me to write a novel. I can pinpoint the exact moment when it happened. It was at 1:30 P.M., April 1, 1978. I was at Jingu Stadium, alone in the outfield, watching a baseball game".
Also interesting how the two activities complemented each other over the years with both requiring solitary, consistent hard work and persistence over a long period of time.
Roam: Why I Love It and How I Use It
Nat Eliason | 16 mins
I have been using Roam for a month now. (Seriously for only two weeks). And it has been a joy! In fact, the last time a tool opened up a new world for me like this was probably vim.
In this post, Nat covers a lot of what makes Roam great. Personally, it has fundamentally influenced how I see and use information and thoughts. In fact, nowadays, I find some of the other tools clunky, frustrating, and limiting. I think that should count a lot, when a tool creates a fundamental shift in one's thinking and perspective. (Perhaps a Transformative Tool For Thought? Need to think more about that though + it needs its separate topic). Anyway, I feel like I am now more attuned to what the tools we use allow and don't allow us to do. And that's important.
(Also worth reminding oneself that better note-taking is not the goal in and of itself, better thinking is. Roam is still a tool and it's up to us how to use it).
How the Beatles Wrote ‘A Day in the Life’
Nicholas Dawidoff | 10 mins
'On the Sgt. Pepper album, however, is “A Day in the Life,” which is my idea of a perfect song. It is the epitome of The Beatles’ master building, of fitting stone upon stone, each section troweled together with such ingenuity and care that upon completion the whole thing feels seamless, a structure not built at all, but a whole that simply was'.
Having recently started listening more of The Beatles, this was a fascinating read.
Memoirs of a "Super-Spreader"
Prasiddhi Shrestha | 7 mins
"The 23rd of March was something else. Somehow, somewhere, someone else had decided the narrative to my story. They had changed up my facts to fit theirs. I became subject and subjected to the stigmatization that surrounded coronavirus in my country."
Behind every number is a story.
// Stories and Poems
Light
Lesley Nneka Arimah | 9 mins | Short Story
Writer and journalist Pranaya SJB Rana has been running a short story reading and discussion group over at Twitter. This was one of the stories I wholly loved!
Days
Aisha Borja | 2 mins | Poem
Such a beautiful poem!
// Snippets
I have been reading Cosmos and it has short biographies of Kepler and Newton sort of embedded into the story. Engrossing stuff. Of course, there were Newton doing Newton things (like quarantining in style) and Kepler's whole life was intriguing. But I found these sections most poignant:
Newton's last words:
"I don’t know what I may seem to the world. But as to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
Kepler's self-written epitaph:
"I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure. Sky-bound was the mind, Earth-bound the body rests".
// Music
Prateek Kuhad - cold/mess
So good! A calm scream from the heart.
Current Joys - A Different Age
Listening to it on the rooftop in the evening, watching the Night fall. <3
// Wholesome
That’s it, good people.
See ya next week! Take Care.
With Love,
Bijay