Do you ever feel there’s too many ready-made answers that don’t fit your needs? Me too. That’s why I’m exploring an alternative: ’living questions’. Not quite Rilke, but also not not Rilke. writingslowly.com
#NoteTaking #LifelongLearning #Zettelkasten
Living questions
Living questions
Instead of chasing after easy answers, the poet Rilke urged a young artist to “live the questions”. Sound advice maybe, but which questions really matter, and how can we go about living them?
“I beg you … to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not know how to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now, perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer …” – Rainer Maria Rilke
Yes, it’s all very well ‘living the questions’ but which questions are we talking about here? All of them? Some of them? Which ones?
Eleven urgent note-making questions are now finding answers
The strange return of the continuous need to make sense of things
The idea of reading continuous narrative may be relatively recent. For example, the Bible is arranged in many places with a long sequential narrative, and some have seen it as ‘the greatest story ever told’. But liturgical practice, both Jewish and Christian, is to split this extended narrative up into excerpted readings (’the reading’ or ’the lesson’; ’the portion’ or parashah).
The novel, meanwhile, encourages readers to assume continuous reading is the natural way of things, even though many novels even into the 20th century were actually serialised on first publication. Here’s Robert Darnton on the significance of fragmentary reading.
“Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end (unless they are digital natives and click through texts on machines), early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your own personality. . . By selecting and arranging snippets from a limitless stock of literature, early modern Englishmen gave free play to a semi-conscious process of ordering experience. The elective affinities that bound their selection into patterns reveal an epistemology — a process of knowing — at work below the surface”
— (Robert Darnton, “Extraordinary Commonplaces,” New York Review of Books 47 (20)[December 21, 2000] 82, 86).
I note this because these days it feels like the age of fragmentary reading has well and truly returned. Every medium has cracked into splinters. Along with this fragmentation comes a revival of the need for a continuous effort to make sense of an increasingly disordered experience. As a result there’s a great need to work out new ways of knowing.
A question I asked on Hyde’s under/over:
Before we find our own voice, we usually copy our mentors or heroes. Who was the teacher or model that inspired you when you started blogging, and how did following their example eventually help you find your own style?
And here’s software engineer Alex Hyett’s excellent answer.
#indieweb #blogging
📷 🍳Sunday morning is time for shakshuka.
Currently reading: Wise Finding Purpose, Meaning and Wisdom Beyond the Midpoint of Life by Frank Tallis 📚
I’m delighted to be featured in Hyde’s intriguing series Under/Over, where bloggers are asked for their thoughts on what they find under-rated and over-rated. I have opinions on Zettelkasten, POSSE, solitude, journalling, pavlova(!) and more. Read on at lazybea.rs.
#indieweb
Currently reading: Wise. Finding Purpose, Meaning and Wisdom Beyond the Midpoint of Life by Frank Tallis 📚
One reason I write:
“We remember only a tiny fraction of existence. We have forgotten most of what it is like to be alive, long before we die. Oblivion starts seeping into our heads as soon as we are self-aware.” (p.44)
I made the twenty photographs that accompany the text of Shu Ha Ri as part of a personal learning process, inspired by David Ulrich’s Zen Camera. I was influenced by Empire of Signs by Roland Bathes. As the author said of that work, “The text does not ‘gloss’ the images, which do not ‘illustrate’ the text.” During the COVID pandemic it was impossible to travel far, but several Japanese-style gardens were within reach. The images included here are of three in particular: Himeji Garden in Adelaide, Edogawa Commemorative Garden in East Gosford, and Auburn Botanic Garden in Sydney.
📷 A pair of cockatoos, feeding each other while scavenging.
#BirdsOfAustralia #WildlifePhotography #FeatheredFriends
The Atlantic suggests that the end of reading is here. It used to be easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But now its easier to imagine the end of literacy than the end of YouTube.
At the End of the World (1921) with Betty Compson and Milton Sills. Public domain.
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Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk’s flight
On the empty sky. – Ursula K. LeGuin
You might care to check out the shortlist for the 2026 Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction.
Cockatoos? Five sulphur-crested cockatoos, foraging beneath the Norfolk Island pines of Botany Bay? Well, all right, if you insist.
#BirdsOfAustralia #WildlifePhotography #FeatheredFriends
Learning to tell a bright cow from a dull one
You might be wondering how anyone can grow from being an advanced learner to becoming an expert. It might seem like an impossible step to climb.
According to the traditional Japanese approach of Shu Ha Ri, a vital step in the learning process is to so absorb the rules that the student transcends them. The rules and conventions become second nature. But what does that look like in practice?
Here’s a great example from the world of veterinary medicine, where veterinary students were trained to identify whether an animal is bright (i.e healthy) or dull (i.e. sickening):
“Eventually, the students get good enough at evaluating bright vs. dull. What’s interesting is that, by then, they’ve lost the rules. What was once effortful and algorithmic is now perceptual and automatic. They can see things you and I do not.” – Oddly-Influenced
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if you found this article interesting you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest. You’ll receive all the week’s posts in a handy email format which you might prefer. But this site does of course have an RSS feed.
News just in from 2009:
“It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter.” – Techcrunch.
Well that didn’t exactly age well. And now there’s an RSS resurgence in the air – from Dave Winer, of course, who made RSS immortal by giving it an audio payload and thereby inventing podcasting.
We’ve been having our regular family disagreement about thinning our bookshelves, which made this article timely: How and why to cull your book collection [via Kottke.org].
On reflection, our bookshelves are very much a working library, more about flow than about stock. Most books pass through.
Odysseus: A name that spells trouble
Since we’re currently lost somewhere in the middle of wars that seemingly have no end-point, and arguably no point, I wonder just what film director Christopher Nolan will make of The Odyssey, his blockbuster movie of which comes out mid-2026.
After I watched another recent movie version of the story, The Return, I found out about the work of psychologist Jonathan Shay with Vietnem veterans. He wrote two books linking the works of Homer – The Iliad and The Odyssey – with the modern experience of warfare and with the travails of homecoming.
Two quotes from Jonathan Shay’s work stood out particularly. First, this one about war-induced PTSD:
Watched: The Return 🍿
Odysseus brings the war home with him. As Simone Weil said of The Iliad, the true hero is force itself.
Happy 250th birthday, USA. The defining image in my lifetime of American culture is the hooded man at Abu Ghraib prison. Well, you’re still young and “finding a place to be/ in the early days of a better civilization,” as Dennis Lee’s poem put it. Here’s to the next 250. It’ll improve; it has to.