Your mind was already thinking ahead to what you would do when the cover plate was off, and so it takes a little time to realize that this irritating minor annoyance of a torn screw slot isn’t just irritating and minor. You’re stuck. Stopped. Terminated. It’s absolutely stopped you from fixing the motorcycle. This isn’t a rare scene in science or technology. This is the commonest scene of all. Just plain stuck.
Now we’ve a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself.
I told her that until he had a real felt need he was just going to resent help, so we went over and sat in the shade and waited.
Another one is cleaning up tool that have been used and not put away and are cluttering up the place. This is a good one because one of the first warning signs of impatience is frustration at not being able to lay your hand on the tool you need right away. If you just stop and put tools away neatly you will both find the tool and also scale down your impatience without wasting time or endangering the work.
For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see.
But it’s better to know a lot and say little, I think, than know a little and say a lot.
My own opinion is that the intellect of modern man isn’t that superior. IQs aren’t that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quarks are to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know.
A man conducting a gee-whiz science show with fifty thousand dollars’ worth of Frankenstein equipment is not doing anything scientific if he knows beforehand what the results of his efforts are going to be. A motorcycle mechanic, on the other hand, who honks the horn to see if the battery works is informally conducting a true scientific experiment. He is testing a hypothesis by putting the question to nature.
Then one evening, contrary to his custom, he drank black coffee and couldn’t sleep. Ideas arose in crowds. He felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination.
And I think it’s about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resource – individual worth.
So we navigate mostly by dead reckoning, and deduction from what clues we find. I keep a compass in one pocket for overcast days when the sun doesn’t show directions and have the map mounted in a special carrier on top of the gas tank where I can keep track of miles from the last junction and know what to look for. With those tools and a lack of pressure to ‘get somewhere’ it works out fine and we just about have America all to ourselves.
When she first came here she used to think there was somebody up in those big buildings who knows what’s going on here. They would never come down and talk to her. After a while she found out nobody knows what’s going on.
He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working.
These were the underdogs, the outsiders, the pariahs, the sinners of his system. But the reason he was so concerned about them was that he felt the quality and strength of his entire system of organization depended on how he treated them. If he treated the pariahs well he would have a good system. If he treated them badly he would have a weak one.
One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.
Walk into any of a hundred thousand classrooms today and hear the teachers divide and subdivide and interrelate and establish “principles” and study “methods” and what you will hear is the ghost of Aristotle speaking down through the centuries – the desiccating lifeless voice of dualistic reason.
It’s the clothes that make them think you’re not really there.
She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before.
Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong.
Writing it seemed to have higher quality than not writing it, that was all.