I recognized the quote immediately, and it's been a little while since I read Bacon. I don't care too much about the scientific method but I really value his essays.
Ah, thank you. It could have easily gone either way—the talk of Beauty and Proportion could well come from an artist. But probably not from the artist Francis Bacon now that I think about it:
Janet Frame: "I am not really a writer. I am just someone who is haunted, and I will write the hauntings down."
“Maybe I am senile already and people are too kind to tell me. People are not kind and would tell me. (Maybe people have told me, and I'm too senile to remember).” - Joseph Heller, Something Happened
I read an essay that Buddy Holly wrote for a sophomore English assignment and I thought I'd share it. It's a few paragraphs but worth reading in my opinion. Spoiler I was born one fall day, a certain particular one, because it was Sept. 7, 1936 and school for that year was starting. It also the first Monday of the month and Dollar Day, and also Labor Day, so you see, it was very eventful in more ways than one. Mr. and Mrs. L.O. Holley were the happy parents of this bouncing, baby boy, or so I'm told, because I was a little young then to be remembering it now. My life has been what you might call an uneventful one, and it seems there is not much of interest to tell. I was born here in Lubbock and except for a year and a half when I moved to the Roosevelt School District, I have lived here all my life so far. I don't remember too much of this period of my life up until the time I started to go to school at Roscoe Wilson when I was seven. Since then I remember most of the more important events of my school days. It was during the 4th grade that I moved to Roosevelt and continued to school there until I finished the 6th grade. I then moved back to the Lubbock School Dist. and started to Junior High School at J.T. HUTCHINSON. It was great to be back among my old grade school friends and everything clicked right off. It was really a joy to me to become a westerner of Lubbock Senior High School. Little did I know what the last nine weeks of my sophomore year held in store for me. This will make the second time I have given my English theme for my test; I got kicked out of Plane Geometry class in the last week of school; I am behind with my Biology work and will probably fail every course I'm taking. At least that's the way I feel. But why quit there? I may as well go ahead and tell all. My father's out of town on a fishing trip, and he is really going to be proud of my latest accomplishments when he gets back. As of now, I have these on the list. When I was driving our pickup Sunday afternoon against a hard wind, the hood came unfastened and blew up and now it's bent so that it won't fasten down good. Before I got home, I stopped at a boy's house and he knocked a baseball in to the front glass, shattering it all over me. As if that wasn't enough, I had an appointment to apply for a job with a drafting firm yesterday afternoon and when my mother came after me, she let me drive on towards town. I had brought a picture of the choir and she was looking at it. She asked where I was, and I pointed to my picture. Just as I looked back up we hit the back of a Chrysler and tore the front end of our car up. So you see, I hope my father gets to catching so many fish that he will forget to come back for a little while. Well, that's enough of bad things for a while. I have many hobbies. Some of these are hunting, fishing, leatherwork, reading, painting and playing western music. I have thought about making a career out of western music if I am good enough but I will just have to wait to see how that turns out. I like drafting and have thought a lot about making it my life's work, but I guess everything will just have to wait and turn out for the best. Well, that's my life to the present date, and even though it may seem awful and full of calamities, I'd sure be in a bad shape without it. FINIS FINALE In other words, THE END
At least he had a clue about his career path at age 15 or 16. Most kids don't. And nearly all of the ones who do have a career plan will be wrong. And of the ones that are right, the chances are good that they will have a different career in a few years, probably in an entirely different field. And a good number of those will find themselves in two or three different careers before they retire, some of which didn't exist when the kids graduated from high school. I think that the days of a trained technician coming out of high school and working in one field until he or she retires are gone, probably forever. Case in point: When I was in high school, I thought I would be a doctor. When I flunked out of pre-med in college, I got a job with the Baltimore City Health Department as a Health Educator (among other duties), that lasted five years, and probably would have lasted longer had I not seen my first hang glider. I quit the civil service job and worked in the hang gliding industry for twenty years. Then I became a professional tentmaker (making replicas of medieval pavilions) and writer before retiring. Please note that there was no hang gliding industry at all when I graduated from high school, and no market for that sort of tent, since large-scale medieval re-enactment groups were yet to be formed. Both career opportunities simply didn't exist. A favorite quote of mine is from J. B. S. Haldane: "The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, but it is queerer than we can imagine." The same can be said of the future.
"Where I fall, ten more shall take my place! And one hundred each of them! So strike me down! I am the harbinger!" – Ollanius Pius
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." ~H.L. Mencken
"The book is second only to the wheel as the best piece of technology human beings have ever invented. A book symbolises the whole intellectual history of mankind; it's the greatest weapon ever devised in the war against stupidity." - Phillip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials, The Book of Dust, etc edit: Pullman is a current working writer, so he's aware of all the modern developments we have at our disposal at the moment—including the internet.
although there's an argument to be made that books made us stupider, because it meant we didn't have to rely on memory nearly as much.
Given the human memory is unreliable, practising is only one skill that can only get so sharp, and more books equal more knowledge you are likely to encounter which means you still have to put effort into memory because the total possible amount is more cancelling out any help. I don't know about that. Books can help
right, books are a net benefit obviously, but I'm certain that memories were/are sharper in oral cultures.
