Contribute.

Buckminster Fuller's sixty-six-year experiment to document his existence ...

On one of those walks, in the autumn of 1927, he stopped at the edge of Lake Michigan. He calculated how long it would take to for him to grow hypothermic and drown. His life insurance would pay out, and his wife and daughters would be provided for. 

Standing on that shore at age 32, feeling like an absolute failure, suicide felt like the only responsible decision.

But as he stood there, on the precipice of ending his life, he felt briefly suspended above the ground, and he heard a voice in his head that said:

“From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.”

The conviction he felt from that thought marked the beginning of a life dedicated to replicating this sense of certainty by documenting the certainty of his existence. 

He went home and told Anne that he was done making decisions based on how he felt. He called it committing egocide. Not suicide, the death of the body. Egocide, the death of the part of him that ran on feeling.

He said that he had to think, and would not utter a word until he knew what he truly thought. For two full years (or so he claimed) Fuller was silent. He filled five thousand pages with notes, in pursuit of the secret to success for the entire human race. 

Fuller decided to make his life an experiment “to find what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.” 

Keep.

Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up in your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter, and lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.

Jack London

Happy Birthday, Thomas Edison

The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.

Thomas Edison, born on this day in 1847, from an interview in the New York Dramatic Mirror titled "The Evolution of the Motion Picture,” conducted by Frederick James Smith

Edison's ...

• Mental Models
• Journaling Habits
• Napping Techniques

Done.

Done and done.

Unsought.

Pourbus, The Younger, Francis Bacon, Lord Keeper, and afterwards, Lord Chancellor of England, 1617

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable. 

Francis Bacon

Useful.

C.S. Lewis' letter to a young girl offering advice on writing ...

When you give up a bit of work don’t (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the re-writing of things begun and abandoned years earlier.

I would add that it's essential to keep a journal and take it with you everywhere.

Everywhere.

Done.

Done and done.

Thanks to Walker's Arms.

Dance.

An overcast morning in July. A taste of ashes flies through the air; - an odor of sweating wood on the hearth, - dew-ret flowers, - devastation along the promenades, - the mist of the canals over the fields - why not incense and toys already?

I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.

The upland pond smokes continuously. What witch will rise against the white west sky? What violet frondescence fall?

While public funds evaporate in feasts of fraternity, a bell of rosy fire rings in the clouds.

Reviving a pleasant taste of India ink, a black powder rains on my vigil. I lower the jets of the chandelier, I throw myself on my bed, and turning my face towards the darkness, I see you, my daughters! my queens!

Arthur Rimbaud, from "Phrases"

Done.

Done and done.

Happy Birthday, Jefferson

Scully, Thomas Jefferson, 1821

I was in the habit of abridging and commonplacing what I read meriting it, and of sometimes mixing my own reflections on the subject. I now inclose you the extract from these entries which I promised. they were written at a time of life when I was bold in the pursuit of knolege, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, & bearding every authority which stood in their way. this must be the apology, if you find the conclusions bolder than historical facts and principles will warrant. Accept with them the assurances of my great esteem and respect.

Thomas Jefferson, born on this day in 1743, from a letter to Thomas Cooper

Happy Birthday, Edison

The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.

Thomas Edison, born on this day in 1847

Edison's ...

• Mental Models
• Journaling Habits
• Napping Techniques

Immediately.

Watts, November Evening in a Welsh Wood, 1893

This month taxes a walker’s resources more than any other. For my part, I should sooner think of going into quarters in November than in winter. If you do feel any fire at this season out of doors, you may depend upon it, it is your own.  It is but a short time these afternoons before the night cometh in which no man can walk. If you delay to start till three o-clock, there will be hardly time left for a long and rich adventure, to get fairly out of town. November Eat-heart, is that the name of it? Not only the fingers cease to do their office, but there is often a benumbing of the faculties generally. You can hardly screw up your courage to take a walk when all is thus tightly locked or frozen up, and so little is to be seen in field or wood. I am inclined to take to the swamps or woods as the warmest place, and the former are still the openest. Nature has herself become like the few fruits she still affords, a very thick-shelled nut with a shrunken meat within. If I find anything to excite a warming thought abroad, it is an agreeable disappointment, for I am obliged to go willfully and against my inclination at first, the prospect looks so barren, so many springs are frozen up, not a flower, perchance, and few birds left, not a companion abroad in all these fields for me. I seem to anticipate a fruitless walk. I think to myself hesitatingly, shall I go there, or there, or there? And cannot make up my mind to any route, all seem so unpromising, mere surface-walking and fronting the cold wind, so that I have to force myself to it often, and at random.

But then I am often unexpectedly compensated, and the thinnest yellow light of November is more warming and exhilarating than any wine they tell of. The mite which November contributes becomes equal in value to the bounty of July. I may meet with something that interests me, and immediately it is as warm as in July, as if it were the south instead of the northwest wind that blew. 

Henry David Thoreau, from his journal, 25 November 1857

Working.

I believe that many who find that "nothing happens" when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.

C.S. Lewis, from the Introduction to On the Incarnation of the Word of God, by St. Athanasius

Happy Birthday, Boswell

Willison, James Boswell, 1765

Every man should keep minutes of whatever he reads. Every circumstance of his studies should be recorded; what books he has consulted; how much of them he has read; at what times; how often the same authors; and what opinions he formed of them, at different periods of his life. Such an account would much illustrate the history of his mind.

James Boswell, born on this day in 1740, paraphrasing Voltaire in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides

Friends.

Alone in distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout lands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself. I once more feel myself grandly related. This cold and solitude are friends of mine.

Henry David Thoreau, from his journal, dated 7 January 1857

Transcribe.

Getting the most out of the reading life ...

1. Read aloud: different forms of cognition and expression make for deeper meaning.
2. Develop a system of marginalia: transform the pages into personal maps of thought.
3. Transcribe inspirational passages: different forms of cognition and expression make for deeper meaning.

Thanks to Steve and Kurt.

Undissected.

It is precisely the colouring, the atmosphere, the unclassifiable individual details of a story, and above all the general purport that informs with life the undissected bones of the plot, that really count.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Treasures.

Wright, Hampton Court House, 1765

On the following morning, the sun darted his beams from over the hills through the low lattice window. I rose at an early hour, and looked out between the branches of eglantine which overhung the casement. To my surprise Scott was already up and forth, seated on a fragment of stone, and chatting with the workmen employed on the new building. I had supposed, after the time he had wasted upon me yesterday, he would be closely occupied this morning, but he appeared like a man of leisure, who had nothing to do but bask in the sunshine and amuse himself.

I soon dressed myself and joined him. He talked about his proposed plans of Abbotsford; happy would it have been for him could he have contented himself with his delightful little vine-covered cottage, and the simple, yet hearty and hospitable style, in which he lived at the time of my visit. The great pile of Abbotsford, with the huge expense it entailed upon him, of servants, retainers, guests, and baronial style, was a drain upon his purse, a tax upon his exertions, and a weight upon his mind, that finally crushed him.

As yet, however, all was in embryo and perspective, and Scott pleased himself with picturing out his future residence, as he would one of the fanciful creations of his own romances. "It was one of his air castles," he said, "which he was reducing to solid stone and mortar." About the place were strewed various morsels from the ruins of Melrose Abbey, which were to be incorporated in his mansion. He had already constructed out of similar materials a kind of Gothic shrine over a spring, and had surmounted it by a small stone cross.

Among the relics from the Abbey which lay scattered before us, was a most quaint and antique little lion, either of red stone, or painted red, which hit my fancy. I forgot whose cognizance it was; but I shall never forget the delightful observations concerning old Melrose to which it accidentally gave rise. The Abbey was evidently a pile that called up all Scott's poetic and romantic feelings; and one to which he was enthusiastically attached by the most fanciful and delightful of his early associations. He spoke of it, I may say, with affection. "There is no telling," said he, "what treasures are hid in that glorious old pile. It is a famous place for antiquarian plunder; there are such rich bits of old time sculpture for the architect, and old time story for the poet. There is as rare picking in it as a Stilton cheese, and in the same taste—the mouldier the better."

Washington Irving, from Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey

Other.

Ernest Hemingway’s papers in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library archives include plenty of items you might expect, like letters and drafts of his many stories and novels. But in addition to being one of the twentieth century’s most famous writers, Hemingway was also a packrat who saved a lifetime of stuff related to his favorite interests: receipts from his best-loved book shops and bars, his packing lists and passports, and decades of jotted-down facts, ideas, and reminders. Archivists grouped these papers – along with everything else that didn’t fit neatly into categories like “Manuscripts” or “Scrapbooks” – into a series called “Other Materials,” and this part of the Hemingway collection is also where we find the fishing, hunting, and boating logs he kept all his life.

CONNECT

Time.

All alone in the edge of the water

Hidin' out by the Sea of Cortez

With my sketch pads and Flairs

Tapes and battery spares

It's just no comprehendo to what everyone says

Time alone seemed to work well for faulkner

Time away seems to work for the kid

Life and ink they run out at the same time

Or so said my old friend the squid

Jimmy Buffett, from "If I Could Just Get It On Paper"