February 25, 2023 - Reading time: ~1 minute
God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come after us, and whose names are already written in the book of creation, as to us; and we have no right, by anything that we do or neglect, to involve them in unnecessary penalties, or deprive them of benefits which it was in our power to bequeath. And this the more, because it is one of the appointed conditions of the labor of men that, in proportion to the time between the seed-sowing and the harvest, is the fulness of the fruit; and that generally, therefore, the farther off we place our aim, and the less we desire to be ourselves the witnesses of what we have labored for, the more wide and rich will be the measure of our success. Men cannot benefit those that are with them as they can benefit those who come after them; and of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.
—John Ruskin, from The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849)
December 11, 2022 - Reading time: ~1 minute
Walking between the old squatter cottages in The Jitties–in cold air and near dark, through mizzling rain–I hear a voice coming from a parked car. It’s American, intimate yet resonant, penetrating, conscious of an audience, and it’s reading from someone’s new novel, one of those clever first person deliveries designed to imply a listener in the text. There’s no driver in the car. There’s no one in the car at all. Its engine is running, it’s stopped at an angle at a corner in a billow of its own smoke. I walk past and go home thinking how much I’d like to win that Radio Four lottery and have my new book read that way, loudly but personably, to an empty lane at the end of November.
—M. John Harrison
How do you coax back a lost creativity?
December 2, 2022 - Reading time: ~1 minute
Sit down.
Be yourself.
Be prepared.
Be attentive.
Defy the voices.
Be the thing you want to be.
Write.
Be playful.
Be reckless.
Remember that you are uniquely designed for the idea that is moving toward you.
You are good enough.
The idea is about to arrive.
—Nick Cave,
The Red Hand Files, issue #9