Today’s final elimination round is the closest thing I’ll do to ‘honorable mentions’ – these three candidates ultimately fell just shy of being among the six finalists.
Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton (May 2018)
Whenever I ask someone for an explanation about anything, I expect a two-part response: first I get the reason, and then sometime later I get The Real Reason. My two experiences with May Sarton’s work is the reading equivalent of this phenomenon. Back in January 2017, I read Sarton’s Plant Dreaming Deep, and I nodded politely – the payoff came sixteen months later when I read Journal of a Solitude. It took great courage for Sarton to dive deep into her gloom, surface with this work, and present it to the world as evidence of victory against her inner war against the guerrilla forces of loneliness, depression, and solitude.
Parting thought: A planned lunch disrupts the rhythm of the day.
I feel a little silly pulling such a banal thought from among Sarton’s far more insightful words but this is the idea that I kept coming back to in the last year. As she notes, there is a natural rhythm to all work and in many cases rushing to the end only brings an incomplete or inconsequential result. The planned lunch is a great way to impose an arbitrary deadline on the day’s initial work and making sure I avoid such commitments has proven more productive for me than any other concept I’ve applied to my schedule.
Tribe by Sebastian Junger (August 2018)
Junger’s short book asks a simple question about modern society – if we have more than anyone else in history, why do we feel something is missing? The basic answer is that a decreased reliance on others for daily needs has left us with very little opportunity to build resilient communities based on their members regularly contributing to shared efforts. The result is that instead of valuing others for what they bring to the empty table, we demonize those who take away from the abundance. Our material prosperity is likely to only increase over time – this suggests that the challenge Junger explores will become more significant in the future.
Parting thought: A society that constantly underscores differences will eventually stop functioning correctly.
This idea suggests that a society’s strength is a direct result of the trust among its members. My experience suggests that people trust each other when they work together to achieve common goals and live by shared principles. If a person starts to see a neighbor as someone with different goals or principles, how much trust will there be in that neighborhood?
Sceptical Essays by Bertrand Russell (October 2018)
I was very impressed by this introduction to Russell’s work and emerged from my reading with a number of new perspectives. In fact, I was surprised to discover how many of Russell’s ideas remained with me these past few months. A number of these were timely despite this collection being published in 1928, including insights into economics, thoughts on machine automation, and theories about the role of government. However, for me his thoughts about education proved the most useful this year. The key is that anyone who teaches must remember that all students have a natural curiosity about the world. The teacher’s role is to find that instinct, awaken it, and protect it from making the many common mistakes that are inevitable in the enthusiasm of any self-guided learning process.
Parting thought: Opportunity and reinforcement are all parents offer their infants as they learn to speak.
As Russell himself notes, what more is required to promote learning at any age?
