7-141
Other P Ideas: Philosophy, Physics, Poetry, Principle, Progress, Prophecy, Prudence, Punishment
With 9 ideas (one of which is an And!) I believe this is tied with S for the most possibilities.
Summary: Classics within Classics
Bonus: I don't think I've ever actually seen an episode Wishbone:
Commentary: I usually preview the first page of several possible pieces for each day. I was pretty sure this was the one for today as soon as I read the opening paragraph.
Our judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on the feelings the things arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be precious in consequence of the idea we frame of it, this is only because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. If we were radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things our mind could entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be unable to point to any one situation or experience in life more valuable or significant than any other.
My dislike of feelings being well established, I as both intrigued by the concept (we tend to judge things based on feelings and impressions, not objectively) and prepared to argue with the conclusion (if we had no feelings, we could still evaluate them based on some criteria. Shoutout to your 7th grade math teacher for teaching you unit rate.)
The rest of the first page goes into an "other people are as obsessed with their lives as you are with yours." I think it's interesting to see how often this was written about in the past, and it's come back, but I feel like it wasn't as popular philosophy/self-help truism for quite awhile in the mid to late 20th century.
Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life significant for the other!—we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lampposts, they to the delights of literature and art.
Clearly James isn't familiar with Wishbone.
I miss the old way of doing these with the Google Doc. There are a few places I want to put snarky little comments that aren't worth pasting into the blog.
After reading his rant about the "cove cabins" I'd like to hear James' opinions on glamping. I think part of his rant is sarcastic, but I'm not sure.
We get several bonus classics, in the form of excerpts from other authors. My favorite was one from Robert Louis Stevenson, about kids and bullseye lanterns. I'll have to read more of his stuff. I'll do one short pull from the almost 3 pages! that James uses, "For to miss the joy is to miss all."
I've written a lot about happiness, contentment, etc. this month. Something I appreciate in a lot of these readings is the emphasis on focusing on happiness. Not in an unreasonable way (the phrase "toxic positivity" strikes me as somewhat toxic itself), but simply on identifying how to be happy and trying to focus on cultivating that. Some of the sub-excerpts in here (and the piece as a whole) lean a bit more towards the latter, but the Stephenson one is solid. James (with some help from Richard Jefferies) almost makes me want to believe in passion. Almost...
Rating: 3/5 I don't agree with all the excerpts and conclusions here, but some of them are solid, and I appreciate the variety of viewpoints.
I am thankful for: Both pleasureful (which Blogger is convinced isn't a word) and painful things, in different ways. Without anything unpleasant it'd be hard to really appreciate the good stuff. Within reason. Not like, "I'm glad I broke my leg so I could run after it healed." More like, "It's worth it to do frustrating things, because then you feel more proud when you succeed."
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