old age is a little like obscenity: impossible to define, but you know it when you see it, and then you want to look away

 --- Sally Adee, in a review of Aliya Whiteley's From the Neck Up, New Scientist, 27 October 2021

Excerpt

For many of us, ageing is both science fiction (something that will happen in a future too distant to care about) and gothic horror (it’s coming, and it will be awful).

In this way, old age is a little like obscenity: impossible to define, but you know it when you see it, and then you want to look away.

... Whiteley’s worlds may be icy and gothic, but the people in them are altogether human, and their funny and cantankerous inner lives make them good company. You will miss these grumpy old people: they’re getting too old for this shit, but so, I would wager, are you. 

a work wicked in its end and destination, but in respect of art and contrivance excellent and admirable

 --- Francis Bacon on Daedalus's Labyrinth, Of the Wisdom of the Ancients (1857), XIX. Dædalus, Or the Mechanic

Excerpt:

Many and excellent works, as well in honour of the gods as for the adornment and ennobling of cities and public places, had been built and modelled by him; but it is for unlawful inventions that his name is most famous. For he it was who supplied the machine which enabled Pasiphae to satisfy her passion for the bull; so that the unhappy and infamous birth of the monster Minotaurus, which devoured the ingenuous youth, was owing to the wicked industry and pernicious genius of this man. Then to conceal the first mischief he added another, and for the security of this pest devised and constructed the Labyrinth; a work wicked in its end and destination, but in respect of art and contrivance excellent and admirable.

A wonderfully concise exposition of our ambivalence about tech and technologists.

studying archetypes, mythology and fairytales is a kind of vaccination against archetypal possession

 --- Joseph R Lee, This Jungian Life podcast, episode 172 - Archetypes

When he [CG Jung] or other clinicians began to feel that an individual's psyche was on the verge of a major archetypal activation, he would task them with reading fairytales endlessly, reading mythology endlessly, so that there would be images and structures other than just the personal life within which this archetypal god could inhabit, and minimize the damage to the individual. So I would venture to say that [42:09] studying archetypes, mythology and fairytales is a kind of vaccination against archetypal possession. 

Skill is just recognizing when you’ve gotten lucky

 --- investor Wilmot Kidd, in a profile by Jason Zweig, Meet the Kidd Who Goes Toe to Toe With Warren Buffett, WSJ, Dec 10, 2021.

Last two paragraphs of the story:

When I ask Mr. Kidd if he attributes his long success to luck or skill, he lets out a long, quiet, dry laugh before saying something I don’t think I will ever forget: “Skill is just recognizing when you’ve gotten lucky.”

He explains, “It’s when you’ve been fortunate enough to make an investment in a great company, and suddenly you realize just how very lucky you were, and you buy more. That’s skill, I suppose. That—and holding on to what you have and not chickening out.”