“Boomers, we know, didn’t appreciate getting long in the tooth. They’re the ones who started this whole fight against Old. But as a Gen Xer, I have to assume it’s worse for us. Our entire gestalt is built around an aura of disaffected youth. There is no natural progression for that energy into middle age. I don’t see us easing into words like ‘seasoned’ or ‘mature.’ Millennials will no doubt take their own kind of offense to aging when it’s their turn, but that is not our cross to bear.”

Pamela Paul “Wait, Who Did You Say Is Middle-Aged?” opinion piece in New York Times October 16, 2022

“An acquaintance who worked in United States Air Force intelligence tells the story of a pilot who was imprisoned in North Vietnam for many years, and lost eighty pounds and much of his health in a jungle camp. When he was released, one of the first things he asked for was to play a game of golf. To the great astonishment of his fellow officers he played a superb game, despite his emaciated condition. To their inquiries he replied that every day of his imprisonment he imagined himself playing eighteen holes, carefully choosing his clubs and approach and systematically varying the course. This discipline not only helped preserve his sanity, but apparently also kept his physical skills intact.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Flow [though if I spent every day imagining myself playing what passes for golf in my life I assure you it would not help preserve what passes for sanity in it]

“To know, but to be as though not knowing, is the height of wisdom.”

Last passage in Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the big problem with Canada’s federal ethics commissioner isn’t the Liberals making a mockery of the post, it’s that we’re trying to substitute technical expertise for character.

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

English novelist L.P. Hartley, quoted in Sylvan Barnet’s “Overview” in the 1986 Signet Classic edition of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar [in Policy Options November 2002 historian Desmond Morton called him “an otherwise obscure English novelist”].

“The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.”

William Morris, quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” in Epoch Times email teaser August 20, 2022

“Meanderthal: A person who walks particularly slowly and aimlessly, often toting cellphones and delaying pedestrian or motor traffic.”

“Social Studies” in Globe & Mail January 6, 2006

“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”

Henry Ford on the witness stand in 1919 during his libel suit against the Chicago Tribune, quoted in Clifton Fadiman, ed., The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes [which as I may have complained before was in fact big and blue]. These words are the apparently origin of his supposed “History is bunk”, and I quote them not because I agree but on the contrary because they embodies a typical progressive fatuity that nothing ever mattered before yet what we do can matter by sheer force of will... and because I want to add that in The Illusion of Technique William Barrett quoted it as “History is the bunk”, which I find interesting because older uses of that term invariably seem to have it as “the bunk” and if anyone knows how or why it got shortened or what the original reference even was I would be interested.