7 Book Reports from Penn's private blog. (Patreon)

For newer Patrons, Penn has always keep a private blog for friends of books he reads. We are experimenting with patreon by publishing them here for your eyes only. Enjoy.

H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald – 220222 – It’s about time I read this book. I guess I’m the last one. But it’s so about grief, and also about something I know nothing about. Like everyone I sure thought that hunting with birds of prey as partners was fascinating and when I saw people that had them, up close, it was mind-blowing, but not really my thing, you know outdoors and animals. But losing one’s parents, that’s till my thing. She’s a wonderful writer.  And the combination of the story of the hawk guy, the story of the hawk, the story of her father, and her own story just swing together so nicely. It’s really a great book. And always surprising. I guess the hawk stuff is just another case of if you care enough about something, no matter how much I don’t care, I care. And she’s a great writer. I really enjoyed this.  And I learned a lot, and I felt a lot. It’s a pretty heavy book that reads nice and easy with a lot of facts along the way.

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by the poet Marianne Moore: The cure for loneliness is solitude.

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spectacularly impassive

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Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water.

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It is a face in desperate need of safety, with certain knowledge that there is none.

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laughed out loud at that. Stimulus: opera. Response: kill. But later these misapplied instincts stop being funny.

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The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.

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We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all of the lives we have lost.

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The coffins, like the tie, made the small loves of life ridiculous in death, the business card made the memorial mundane. The laughter was because there was no way of incorporating these signs of life into the fact of death. I laughed because there was nothing else I could do.

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There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories

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It was more like gambling, though the stakes were infinitely bloodier. At its heart was a willed loss of control. You pour your heart, your skill, your very soul, into a thing – into training a hawk, learning the form in racing or the numbers in cards – then relinquish control over it. That is the hook. Once the dice rolls, the horse runs, the hawk leaves the fist, you open yourself to luck, and you cannot control the outcome. Yet everything you have done until that moment persuades you that you might be lucky. The hawk might catch her quarry, the cards might fall perfectly, the horse make it first past the post. That little space of irresolution is a strange place to be. You feel safe because you are entirely at the world’s mercy. It is a rush. You lose yourself in it. And so you run towards those little shots of fate, where the world turns. That is the lure: that is why we lose ourselves, when powerless from hurt and grief, in drugs or gambling or drink; in addictions that collar the broken soul and shake it like a dog. I had found my addiction on that day out with Mabel. It was as ruinous, in a way, as if I’d taken a needle and shot myself with heroin. I had taken flight to a place from which I didn’t want to ever return.

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Every morning I wake at five and have thirty seconds’ lead-time before despair crashes in.

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And that it is hard to live for long periods without trusting anyone or anything. It’s like living without sleep; eventually it will kill you.

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In Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology he’d found a whole chapter on homosexuality. It held that the attitude of homosexuals was ‘that of people desirous of interfering with the flight of time’. Adler thought homosexuals were irresponsible because they refused to develop into heterosexual adulthood. But interfering with the flight of time? Words once read run deep.

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I am convinced that if nobody had ever invented knots, nobody would ever have imagined magicians.

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I held the cardboard and felt its scissor-cut edge. And for the first time I understood the shape of my grief. I could feel exactly how big it was. It was the strangest feeling, like holding something the size of a mountain in my arms. You have to be patient, he had said. If you want to see something very much, you just have to be patient and wait. There was no patience in my waiting, but time had passed all the same, and worked its careful magic. And now, holding the card in my hands and feeling its edges, all the grief had turned into something different. It was simply love. I tucked the card back into the bookshelf. ‘Love you too, Dad,’ I whispered.

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Because she is not human. Of all the lessons I’ve learned in my months with Mabel this is the greatest of all: that there is a world of things out there – rocks and trees and stones and grass and all the things that crawl and run and fly. They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own views of the world. In my time with Mabel I’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not. And I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it. Goshawks are things of death and blood and gore, but they are not excuses for atrocities. Their inhumanity is to be treasured because what they do has nothing to do with us at all.

Dirty Pictures: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits, Geniuses, Bikers, Pothead, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art School Rebels Revolutionized Art and Invented Comix by Brian Doherty – 220316 – Reason Magazine gave me this book in PDF form because they wanted a blurb. Because it was PDF I don’t have highlights. It’s a REALLY fucking long book. Wow. It was so long, that even though I read it fast and diligently by the time I was done, it was too late for the blurb.  Jesus. It does cover about everything that can be known about underground comix. I’m not a visual person and never really got into any comics and or comix, but how much they snuck into the culture is pretty amazing. Of course, R. Crumb is not pretty much considered to be racist and misogynist, but those are the times that we’re in. And the court cases of the Air Pirates were really interesting, as well as all the obscenity cases. So, I now know a bit about underground comix.  Good.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates – 220408 – 30 years ago, rob pike suggested I read a book for Richard Yates short stories, and I read about reading it in my journal and read my notes and remembered how I have loved that book (I had forgotten it).  So, I grabbed another one, and it did not disappoint.  Man, good writing just kills me. Every sentence is a description of life. There are no tricks in this book, it just tells a story in a way that tells all the world. So simple and yet not at all.  Goddamn.  I just loved it.

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“Okay.” He was backing away, holding out both stiff trembling hands like a man intently describing the length of a short fish.

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she was constantly in motion, a trim, leather-skinned woman in her fifties whose eyes expressed a religious belief in the importance of keeping busy. Even when she stood still there was kinetic energy in the set of her shoulders and the hang of her loose, angrily buttoned-up clothes;

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“Don’t say that. Christ’s sake, you don’t ‘love’ people when they’re ‘nice.’ Don’t you see that’s the same as saying ‘What’s in it for me?’ Look.”

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after a while he found he had to keep reminding himself to be pleased.

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By the time he reached the office he had passed into that euphoria of half-refreshed exhaustion in which all sounds are muffled, all sights are blurred and every task is easy.

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“Oh, now, don’t be silly,” he told her, allowing his voice to grow heavy and rich with common sense. “What makes you want to think a thing like that?”

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he shivered pleasurably once or twice as a man who has been out since before dawn will shiver at the feel of the first faint warmth of sun on his neck. He felt himself at peace; and by the time the car did come, he was ready for it.

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She was trying to filibuster the afternoon away.

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He licked his lips, which tasted as foreign as the flesh of a dentist’s finger in his mouth

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He shut off the machine and got slowly to his feet, moving toward her with the loose, almost sleepy gait of a man who knows exactly what he’s doing.

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It was the old combat feeling, the sense of doing exactly the right thing, quickly and well, when all the other elements of the situation were out of control.

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Why, hell, if she was dying that janitor wouldn’t be pushing his mop so peacefully across the linoleum, and he certainly wouldn’t be humming, nor would they let the radio play so loud in the ward a few doors away. If April Wheeler was dying they certainly wouldn’t have this bulletin board here on the wall, with its mimeographed announcement of a staff dance (“Fun! Refreshments!”) and they wouldn’t have these wicker chairs arranged this way, with this table and this neat display of magazines. What the hell did they expect you to do? Sit down and cross your legs and flip through a copy of Life while somebody died? Of course not.

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out in the kitchen, in case anyone got hungry later (“Life goes on,” her mother had always said, making sandwiches on the day of a death);

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The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because the thing was so easily corrupted: let yourself go and you started embellishing your own sobs,

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, Richard Dawkins – 220506 – When Tim Jenison tells me to read a book, I best read it. He’s always right. This is a great book about how the brain works. The guy who wrote took time off of his study of the brain to invent to Palm Pilot and make enough money to keep studying the brain. Tim had told me a lot about this book, so I had the idea that what we’re experiencing in the outside world, is really just models in our minds that move around.  The world doesn’t look like that. The world doesn’t look like anything. The fact that we live about a third of a second in the past, allows these models to be presented.  And all the little “brains” vote on what we’re experiencing and then present it. It’s a nice way of looking at things that explains a lot. At the end of the book he gets a little goofy thinking about space travel and keeping knowledge for millions of years, but I forgive that. Maybe even that’s a good thing.  There was a lot to think about.  It’s a pretty great book. It seems like there are few things more interesting than understanding what finds things interesting.

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The world of things entered your infant mind To populate that crystal cabinet. Within its walls the strangest partners met, And things turned thoughts did propagate their kind. For, once within, corporeal fact could find A spirit. Fact and you in mutual debt Built there your little microcosm—which yet Had hugest tasks to its small self assigned. Dead men can live there, and converse with stars: Equator speaks with pole, and night with day; Spirit dissolves the world’s material bars— A million isolations burn away. The Universe can live and work and plan, At last made God within the mind of man.

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if the old brain were “aware” of the betrayal of sex’s Darwinian purpose, the act of donning a condom would be unbearably painful.

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Darwin was nervous that his theory of evolution would cause an uproar. So, in the book, he covers a lot of dense and relatively uninteresting material about variation in the animal kingdom before finally describing his theory toward the end. Even then, he never explicitly says that evolution applies to humans.

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Being able to learn practically anything requires the brain to work on a universal principle.

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For example, you may have trouble accepting that vision and language are fundamentally the same.

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The brain creates a predictive model. This just means that the brain continuously predicts what its inputs will be. Prediction isn’t something that the brain does every now and then; it is an intrinsic property that never stops, and it serves an essential role in learning. When the brain’s predictions are verified, that means the brain’s model of the world is accurate. A mis-prediction causes you to attend to the error and update the model.

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As we work on a problem, we uncover what I call constraints. Constraints are things that the solution to the problem must address.

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Aha moments occur when a new idea satisfies multiple constraints.

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If you have trouble understanding how something can have more than three dimensions, consider this analogy. Say I want to create a reference frame in which I can organize knowledge about all the people I know. One dimension I might use is age. I can arrange my acquaintances along this dimension by how old they are. Another metric might be where they live relative to me. This would require two more dimensions. Another dimension could be how often I see them, or how tall they are. I am up to five dimensions. This is just an analogy; these would not be the actual dimensions used by the neocortex. But I hope you can see how more than three dimensions could be useful.

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A well-known trick for remembering a list of items, known as the method of loci or sometimes the memory palace, is to imagine placing the items you want to remember at different locations in your house. To recall the list of items, you imagine walking through your house, which brings back the memory of each item one at a time. The success of this memory trick tells us that recalling things is easier when they are assigned to locations in a familiar reference frame. In this case, the reference frame is the mental map of your house.

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Being an expert is mostly about finding a good reference frame to arrange facts and observations.

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Albert Einstein started with the same facts as his contemporaries. However, he found a better way to arrange them, a better reference frame, that permitted him to see analogies and make predictions that were surprising.

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Consequentially, the input to the neocortex is not like a photograph. It is a highly distorted and incomplete quilt of image patches. Yet we are unaware of the distortions and missing pieces; our perception of the world is uniform and complete.

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Recall that in early 1992 there was no digital music, no digital photography, no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, and no data on cell phones. The first consumer web browser had yet to be invented.

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This goal is called “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, to distinguish it from today’s limited AI.

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I described in this chapter: continuous learning, learning through movement, learning many models, and using general-purpose reference frames for storing knowledge and generating goal-oriented behaviors. In the future, I believe almost all forms of machine intelligence will have these attributes, although we are a long way from that today.

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Philosopher David Chalmers famously claimed that consciousness is “the hard problem,” whereas understanding how the brain works is “the easy problem.”

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“Qualia” is the name for how sensory inputs are perceived, how they feel.

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The redness of the fire truck is a fabrication of the brain—it is a property of the brain’s model of surfaces, not a property of light per se.

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If a scientist makes the extraordinary claim that consciousness cannot be explained by neural activity, we should be skeptical, and the burden should be on them to show why.

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Hence, right now, there could be millions of planets with intelligent life just like ours, scattered throughout our galaxy, and—if each planet had a SETI program just like ours—nobody would detect anything. They, like us, would be saying, “Where is everybody?”

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Entrepreneurs are far more likely to succeed by telling people what they are doing than by being secretive

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If we expect to discover intelligent life in our galaxy, it requires that intelligent life occurs often and that it lasts a long time.

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Every environmentalist would be happy to see the extinction of some living things—say, the poliovirus—while simultaneously going to great lengths to save an endangered wildflower. From the universe’s perspective, this is an arbitrary distinction; neither the poliovirus nor the wildflower is better or worse than the other. We make the choice about what to protect based on what is in our best interest.

Poems Of Richard Wilbur by Richard Wilbur – 220523 – I was looking for a book of poems that weren’t free verse. Kind of modern poems that did stuff with rhyming and scansion. This book did that, and really smart and well done, but the feelings didn’t move me. I didn’t get much out of it. Poetry is very hard for me. I’m not good at reading it, but I read at least a poem every day and try to think. But these didn’t grab me.  I think I’ll do Robert Frost next.

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Je soutenais l'éclat de la mort toute pure.

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Duke, keep your coin. All men are born distraught, And will not for the world be satisfied. Whether we live in fact, or but in thought, We die of thirst, here at the fountain-side.

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Castles and Distances I From blackhearted water colder Than Cain's blood, and aching with ice, from a gunmetal bay No one would dream of drowning in, rises The walrus: head hunched from the oxen shoulder. The serious face made for surprises Looks with a thick dismay At the camera lens which takes Him in, and takes him back to cities, to volleys of laughter In film palaces, just as another, brought By Jonas Poole to England for the sakes Of James First and his court, was thought

Most strange, and died soon after. So strangeness gently steels Us, and curiosity kills, keeping us cool to go Sail with the hunters unseen to the walrus rock And stand behind their slaughter: which of us feels The harpoon's hurt, and the huge shock When the blood jumps to flow? Oh, it is hunters alone Regret the beastly pain, it is they who love the foe That quarries out their force, and every arrow Is feathered soft with wishes to atone; Even the surest sword in sorrow Bleeds for its spoiling blow.

Sometimes, as one can see Carved at Amboise in a high relief, on the lintel stone Of the castle chapel, hunters have strangely come To a mild close of the chase, bending the knee Instead of the bow, struck sweetly dumb To see from the brow bone Of the hounded stag a cross Grown, and the eyes clear with grace. Perfectly still Are the cruising dogs as well, their paws aground In a white hush of lichen. Beds of moss Spread, and the clearing wreathes around The dear suspense of will. But looking higher now To the chapel steeple, see among points and spines of the updrawn Vanishing godbound stone, ringing its sped Thrust as a target tatters, a round row Of real antlers taken from dead

Deer. The hunt goes on.

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Juggler A ball will bounce, but less and less. It's not A light-hearted thing, resents its own resilience. Falling is what it loves, and the earth falls So in our hearts from brilliance, Settles and is forgot. It takes a sky-blue juggler with five red balls To shake our gravity up. Whee, in the air The balls roll round, wheel on his wheeling hands, Learning the ways of lightness, alter to spheres Grazing his finger ends, Cling to their courses there, Swinging a small heaven about his ears. But a heaven is easier made of nothing at all Than the earth regained, and still and sole within The spin of worlds, with a gesture sure and noble He reels that heaven in, Landing it ball by ball, And trades it all for a broom, a plate, a table. Oh, on his toe the table is turning, the broom's Balancing up on his nose, and the plate whirls On the tip of the broom! Damn, what a show, we cry: The boys stamp, and the girls Shriek, and the drum booms And all comes down, and he bows and says good-bye. If the juggler is tired now, if the broom stands In the dust again, if the table starts to drop Through the daily dark again, and though the plate Lies flat on the table top, For him we batter our hands Who has won for once over the world's weight.

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Parable I read how Quixote in his random ride Came to a crossing once, and lest he lose The purity of chance, would not decide Whither to fare, but wished his horse to choose. For glory lay wherever he might turn. His head was light with pride, his horse's shoes Were heavy, and he headed for the barn.

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Awkward and milky and beautiful only to hunger.

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And doubtless it is dangerous to love This somersault of seasons; But I am weary of The winter way of loving things for reasons.

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The beautiful changes as a forest is changed By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it; As a mantis, arranged On a green leaf, grows Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Short Stories in Spanish for Beginners: Read for pleasure at your level, expand your vocabulary and learn Spanish the fun way! (Teach Yourself Book 1) – Olly Richards – 220711 – Estoy intentando aprender Español. Es muy difícil.  Este libro es para los estúpidos como mi. Tiene cuentos, fantasía, ciencia ficción, romance, cosas que no leo pero aprender español, lo leo. Estoy no bueno, pero estoy mejor. Como patear un chihuahua español cuesta arriba.

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey – 220711 – When Tim Jenison tells me to read a book, I read it. I’m so interested in how people handle time. It’s all we have.  We make our habits and then they make us. All of us just riding an elephant that is our body and trying to get ourselves to do things.  Seeing how these people did it, is pretty great. I try to get as many habits as I can to get things done, but this shows me I can do more. I’ve taken most of my writing time and turned it to learning Spanish. That’s been 800 hours so far, so it’s cost me 2 books, but I think I’m more than halfway to where I’ll end up and I can go to maintenance. One thing this book tells you, is that really creative people take walks.  It’s amazing how many people in this book have walks built into their rituals.  But, man, rituals matter. It’s how you get things done. This is a great book to see what the rituals have in common and what they don’t.  I loved it.  Thanks,  Tim.

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(John Cheever thought that you couldn’t even type a business letter without revealing something of your inner self—isn’t that the truth?)

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A solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for one’s mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods.

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This was one of William James’s favorite subjects. He thought you wanted to put part of your life on autopilot; by forming good habits, he said, we can “free our minds to advance to really interesting fields of action.”

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“Sooner or later,” Pritchett writes, “the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.”

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“Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition,” Auden wrote in 1958.

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relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, which lasted from 1929 until his death in 1980. (Theirs was an intellectual partnership with a somewhat creepy sexual component; according to a pact proposed by Sartre at the outset of their relationship, both partners could take other lovers, but they were required to tell each other everything.)

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Fortunately, Highsmith was rarely short of inspiration; she had ideas, she said, like rats have orgasms.

Highsmith had to get around the prohibition against bringing live snails into the country. So she smuggled them in, making multiple trips across the border with six to ten of the creatures hidden under each breast.

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I love the very precious combination of work and of living-together that filmmaking offers.”

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“Do you know what moviemaking is?” Bergman asked in a 1964 interview. “Eight hours of hard work each day to get three minutes of film. And during those eight hours there are maybe only ten or twelve minutes, if you’re lucky, of real creation. And maybe they don’t come. Then you have to gear yourself for another eight hours and pray you’re going to get your good ten minutes this time.”

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strategy that John Cage taught him—it was “the most important advice anybody ever gave me,” Feldman told a lecture audience in 1984. “He said that it’s a very good idea that after you write a little bit, stop and then copy it. Because while you’re copying it, you’re thinking about it, and it’s giving you other ideas. And that’s the way I work. And it’s marvelous, just wonderful, the relationship between working and copying.”

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For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart.”

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Kierkegaard had his own quite peculiar way of having coffee: Delightedly he seized hold of the bag containing the sugar and poured sugar into the coffee cup until it was piled up above the rim. Next came the incredibly strong, black coffee, which slowly dissolved the white pyramid. The process was scarcely finished before the syrupy stimulant disappeared into the magister’s stomach, where it mingled with the sherry to produce additional energy that percolated up into his seething and bubbling brain—which

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All those I think who have lived as literary men,—working daily as literary labourers,—will agree with me that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

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“After all,” as he wrote years later, “work is still the best way of escaping from life!”

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and which Marx promptly misspent, having no money-management skills whatsoever. “I don’t suppose anyone has ever written about ‘money’ when so short of the stuff,”

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Jung was not shy about taking time off; “I’ve realized that somebody who’s tired and needs a rest, and goes on working all the same is a fool,” he said.)

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There is no running water, I pump the water from the well. I chop the wood and cook the food. These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple!”

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then he practised his “Mediterranean yoga,” a nap, but for just five minutes;

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You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.

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“I don’t believe in draining the reservoir, do you see? I believe in getting up from the typewriter, away from it, while I still have things to say.”

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I have acquired the reputation over the years of being prolix when in fact I am measured against people who simply don’t work as hard or as long.”

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“Inspiration is for amateurs,” Close says. “The rest of us just show up and get to work.”

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“My experience has been that most really serious creative people I know have very, very routine and not particularly glamorous work habits,” Adams said in a recent interview.

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While he was writing his first book, The Mezzanine, Baker worked a series of office jobs in Boston and New York. Then his routine was to write on his lunch break, taking advantage of this “pure, blissful hour of freedom” in the middle of the day to make notes for a novel that was, appropriately, about an office drone returning to work from his lunch hour.

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Baker liked the early-morning feeling so much that he has stuck with this schedule ever since—and, more recently, has developed a strategy to squeeze two mornings out of one day. He says, “A typical day for me would be that I would get up around four, four-thirty. And I write some. Make coffee sometimes, or not. I write for maybe an hour and a half. But then I get really sleepy. So I go back to sleep and then I wake up at around eight-thirty.” After waking for the second time, Baker talks with his wife, drinks another cup of coffee, eats a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and goes back to his writing, this time focusing on “daylight kind of work,” like typing up notes for a nonfiction piece, transcribing an interview, or editing what he wrote during the first morning session. He continues to work more or less all day, stopping to have lunch, walk the dog, and run errands as necessary. Occasionally, if he’s feeling a lot of deadline pressure, he will write late at night as well, but he generally says good night to his wife and kids around 9:30

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“As soon as I am awake, I remember my duty, and like a brisk mariner I give the lash to indolence and bounce up with as much vivacity as if a pretty girl, amorous and willing, were waiting for me,” Boswell boasted in his journal in 1763.

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“dreary as a dromedary,”

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Boswell writes, “Life has much uneasiness; that is certain. Always remember that, and it will never surprise you.”

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“that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action—and consequently accumulate grain on grain of wilful choice like a very miser—never forgetting how one link dropped undoes an indefinite number.”

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The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.

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Joyce was asked if he had been seeking the right words. “No,” he replied, “I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentences I have.”)

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“I calculate that I must have spent nearly 20,000 hours in writing Ulysses.”

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Stravinsky worked on his compositions daily, with or without inspiration,

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Satie received a small inheritance, which he used to purchase a dozen identical chestnut-colored velvet suits, with the same number of matching bowler hats. Locals who saw him pass by each day soon began calling him the Velvet Gentleman.

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Picasso wanted a lifestyle which would permit him to work in peace without material worries—‘like a pauper,’ he used to say, ‘but with lots of money.’

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In 1968, an interviewer asked if he was “a nine-till-five man.” “No,” Greene replied. “Good heavens, I would say I was a nine-till-a-quarter-past-ten man.”

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he believed that sexual stimulation improved his concentration and even his eyesight: “With a stiff prick I can read the small print in prayer books but with a limp prick I can barely read newspaper headlines.”

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Two hours. I think most writers would be very happy with two hours of concentrated work.”

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(“I don’t approve of people who watch television,” he said, “but I am one of them.”)

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that famous line from Flaubert tacked to my wall: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a Bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.” I believe it.

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The German poet, historian, philosopher, and playwright kept a drawer full of rotting apples in his workroom; he said that he needed their decaying smell in order to feel the urge to write.

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“We have failed to recognize our great asset: time. A conscientious use of it could make us into something quite amazing.”

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“Schubert was extraordinarily fertile and industrious in composing. For everything else that goes by the name of work he had no use.”

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Inspiration can pass through the soul just as easily in the midst of an orgy as in the silence of the woods, but when it is a question of giving form to your thoughts, whether you are secluded in your study or performing on the planks of a stage, you must be in total possession of yourself.

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“The days melt in my hands like ice in the sun,” he wrote in 1830. “I’m not living, I’m wearing myself out in a horrible fashion—but whether I die of work or something else, it’s all the same.”

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A solid routine, he added, “saves you from giving up.”

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The Benzedrine helped Rand push through the last stages of The Fountainhead, but it soon became a crutch. She would continue to use amphetamines for the next three decades, even as her overuse led to mood swings, irritability, emotional outbursts, and paranoia—traits Rand was susceptible to even without drugs.

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The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go I have completed the ritual

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King writes every day of the year, including his birthday and holidays, and he almost never lets himself quit before he reaches his daily quota of two thousand words.

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Bellow thrived on chaos. In the midst of composition, he fielded phone calls from editors and travel agents, friends and students; stood on his head to restore concentration; bantered with his son Daniel when he was staying at the house.

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Bellow gave a more succinct description of his routine. “I simply get up in the morning and go to work, and I read at night,” he wrote. “Like Abe Lincoln.”