Drive: Ideas for sustained work. - Page 24

Editor’s note

Drive

Selected for practical perspectives on effort, recovery and sustained work.

Q2075

DriveLiterature

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

The sentence now travels alone, printed on posters and quoted at conferences. Baldwin wrote it in a 1962 essay for a newspaper book review, and he was talking about novelists — arguing that American writers of his generation flinched from looking at the country they lived in. He built the line as a hinge, turning 'everything' into 'nothing' and swapping the verbs. The promise inside it is deliberately small: facing something guarantees nothing, but nothing happens without it.

James Baldwin, 'As Much Truth As One Can Bear' (1962)Read card

Q2076

DriveLiterature

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.

Le Guin was 85, collecting a medal for a lifetime of American letters, and she spent her few minutes at the microphone attacking the industry that was honouring her. Publishers, she said, were selling books as commodities and writers were letting them. Then came this line, and the argument underneath it: every arrangement that feels permanent was once defended as the natural order, and every one of them was made by people who could be argued with.

Ursula K. Le Guin, National Book Awards speech (2014)Read card

Q2077

DriveHistory

Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

Achebe offered this as a proverb he had inherited, not a line he had written, and he used it to explain why he became a novelist at all. He had grown up reading books in which Africans appeared as scenery in someone else's adventure. 'Things Fall Apart', published in 1958, is his answer: an Igbo village described from inside, its quarrels and courts and gods given the same weight a European novel gives its own.

Chinua Achebe, quoting a proverb, The Paris Review (1994)Read card

Q2080

StillnessLiterature

Seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

These are the last lines of a book in which Marco Polo describes fifty-five imaginary cities to an ageing Kublai Khan. The hell they are discussing is not somewhere else and not later — it is the one we make by living together, Polo says, and there are only two ways out. The first is to stop noticing it. The second is this one, which asks for constant attention and gives no comfort in return.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972)Read card

Q2081

DriveLiterature

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

The question is usually quoted on its own, where it sounds like a challenge to achieve something. In the poem it arrives after twelve quiet lines spent watching a single grasshopper — her jaws moving side to side, her enormous complicated eyes, the sugar taken from Oliver's hand. Oliver walked the woods of Provincetown most mornings with a notebook in her pocket. The question earns its force from the attention that comes before it.

Mary Oliver, 'The Summer Day', House of Light (1990)Read card

Q2083

DriveLiterature

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

The sentence has a second half that rarely travels with it: 'What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.' Dillard is writing about timetables, not destiny. A schedule, she says, is a net for catching days, a scaffolding you climb inside so that the work happens whether or not you feel like it. She wrote the book in a cinder-block study with the view taped over.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989)Read card

Q2084

DriveLiterature

Once in a lifetime the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme.

Heaney wrote this chorus for his version of a Sophocles play, staged in 1990 while Northern Ireland was still at war with itself. The lines directly before it are the ones people forget: 'History says, don't hope on this side of the grave.' The famous half only means anything because of that refusal. Politicians have quoted it ever since, usually the hopeful part, and Heaney was wary of how easily it was borrowed.

Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy (1990)Read card

Q2089

DriveLiterature

You must change your life.

The poem describes a broken statue in a museum: no head, no arms, no eyes to meet. Rilke spends thirteen lines arguing that the stone still looks back, that it burns from inside like a lamp turned low — and then, with no warning, the last line stops describing and gives an order. He wrote it after two years as secretary to the sculptor Rodin, who had told him to go to the zoo and look at an animal until he could really see it.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 'Archaic Torso of Apollo' (1908)Read card

Q2091

DriveLiterature

'Can you describe this?' And I said: 'I can.'

Akhmatova spent seventeen months in the queues outside a Leningrad prison, waiting for news of her son. One day a woman with blue-tinged lips recognised her, leaned in and whispered the question — everyone in those queues whispered. This exchange became the preface to 'Requiem', her poem cycle about the terror. For years it existed nowhere but in the memories of a few trusted friends, who learned it by heart so that no page could be found.

Anna Akhmatova, 'Instead of a Preface', Requiem (1957)Read card

Q2097

DriveHealth

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

Lorde wrote this in the journals she kept while living with liver cancer, having already survived breast cancer six years earlier. She was refusing a second round of surgery and deciding how to spend the time she had. The line has since been printed on bath products and wellness calendars, which reverses it: she was not recommending a treat. She was arguing that a body the world would rather lose has a political reason to stay alive.

Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light (1988)Read card

Q2101

DrivePhilosophy

The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression.

She was born Gloria Jean Watkins and wrote under her great-grandmother's name, kept deliberately in lower case so that readers would look at the argument rather than the author. Love, in her books, is not a feeling that happens to you but something you do — and she treated it as political work rather than private consolation, which is why the sentence puts choosing and resisting in the same breath.

bell hooks, Outlaw Culture (1994)Read card

Q2103

DriveTechnology

The most damaging phrase in the language is: 'We've always done it this way.'

Hopper kept a clock on her office wall that ran backwards, hands sweeping anticlockwise, and she could read it perfectly well. It was there to make a point to visitors: the direction is a convention, not a law. She argued for years that computers should take instructions in something close to English, and was told it could not be done. The language that came out of that argument, COBOL, was still running bank systems sixty years later.

Grace Hopper, Information Week interview (1987)Read card

Q2104

StillnessScience

I start with the seedling, and I don't want to leave it. I don't feel I really know the story if I don't watch the plant all the way along.

McClintock grew her own maize, knew individual plants, and worked out in the 1940s that genes can move along a chromosome — that the genome is not a fixed string of beads. Geneticists ignored the result for decades; she stopped publishing her main findings rather than argue. In 1983, at eighty-one, she was given the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, unshared. Her method was patience with one plant, repeated for forty years.

Barbara McClintock, quoted in Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism (1983)Read card

Q2106

WonderScience

The reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something.

In 1925 her doctoral thesis showed that stars are made overwhelmingly of hydrogen and helium — a result nobody expected and nobody wanted. A senior astronomer persuaded her to add a line calling it almost certainly not real. He published the same conclusion four years later and took the credit for decades. She was given the prize named after him in 1977, and used the lecture to tell young researchers what the job is actually for.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Henry Norris Russell Prize lecture (1977)Read card

Q2108

DriveArt

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

He was twenty-eight and had been drawing seriously for barely a year, having failed as an art dealer, a teacher and a preacher. The letter was written days after a furious row with his father that ended with Vincent leaving home. Around 820 of his letters survive, roughly 650 of them to Theo, who sent the money that bought the paint. The date is often given as 1888; it is 1881, before he had painted anything anyone remembers.

Vincent van Gogh, letter to his brother Theo (1881)Read card

Q2109

DriveArt

I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn't say any other way — things I had no words for.

In 1915, teaching in a small college in South Carolina, O'Keeffe decided that everything she had been trained to do was somebody else's language. She put the paintings away, spread paper on the floor and worked in charcoal until the shapes were hers. A friend showed the drawings to the photographer Alfred Stieglitz in New York without asking her. He exhibited them; she travelled up to complain, and stayed.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Some Memories of Drawings (1976)Read card

Q2110

DriveArt

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique.

Graham said this to the choreographer Agnes de Mille, who had just had the biggest success of her life with 'Oklahoma!' and was miserable about it — she thought the work was mediocre and the praise proved her judgement was broken. Graham's reply was that an artist does not get to grade the work. The job is to keep the channel open and stay dissatisfied, because dissatisfaction is what keeps anyone marching.

Martha Graham, quoted in Agnes de Mille, Martha (1991)Read card

Q2111

DriveHistory

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

Jacobs had no training in planning. She was a magazine writer who looked out of her window in Greenwich Village and noticed that the streets officials called slums were working, and the tidy projects replacing them were not. The argument here is about rent, not nostalgia: new construction has to earn back its cost, so only proven, well-funded ventures can afford it. Bookshops, studios, odd little businesses and untested ideas need cheap old rooms.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)Read card

Q2113

DriveLiterature

Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.

Bradbury had no money for an office, so he wrote 'Fahrenheit 451' in the typing room of a university library basement, on a machine that ran on coins: ten cents bought half an hour. The clock made him write fast, and every time it stopped he went upstairs and walked between the shelves. The first draft cost him nine dollars and eighty cents. He was thirty-three and had a book about the burning of books.

Ray Bradbury, introduction to Fahrenheit 451 (2003 edition)Read card

Q2114

DriveLiterature

Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.

Hughes was barely into his twenties when he wrote this, and had already left Columbia University after a year of being treated as an intruder there. He worked as a delivery boy, a mess boy on a freighter to West Africa, a cook in a Paris nightclub. The poem is eight short lines and refuses to promise the dreams will come true — only that a life without them cannot get off the ground.

Langston Hughes, 'Dreams'Read card

Q2115

DrivePhilosophy

Be the change you wish to see in the world.

Nobody has found this sentence in Gandhi's writings, and researchers have looked hard through millions of published words. The earliest close match appears in 1974, in a chapter by an American educator named Arleen Lorrance. What Gandhi did write, in a 1913 column about snakebite remedies, is quieter and stranger: 'If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.' The slogan promises the world will follow. Gandhi only promised that your relation to it would.

Widely attributed to Mahatma Gandhi; not found in his writingsRead card

Q2116

DriveMind

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Princeton's exhaustive collection of Einstein quotations files this one under 'misattributed'. The trail stops in 1981, twenty-six years after he died: a Knoxville newspaper reporting an Al-Anon meeting in October, and a Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet printed in November. That origin is worth knowing rather than embarrassing. The line was written by people helping each other out of addiction, which is exactly the situation it describes, and it never needed a physicist's name to be true.

Widely attributed to Albert Einstein; first traced to 1981Read card

Q2117

DriveHistory

Well-behaved women seldom make history.

It gets credited to Marilyn Monroe on mugs and to Eleanor Roosevelt on posters. It was written in 1976 by a young historian in a scholarly article about pious New England women, and Ulrich did not mean it as encouragement. She meant it as a complaint about the archive: these women left almost no record precisely because they gave nobody anything to write down. The slogan escaped, and thirty years later she wrote a book with the same title to explain it.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, American Quarterly (1976)Read card

Q2118

DriveHistory

Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful.

It is the most famous job advert in history and there is no evidence it was ever placed. Researchers have combed the London papers for a century, and a standing reward for a copy has gone unclaimed. The earliest known printing is a 1944 American book, which offers it openly as a paraphrase of Shackleton. What is documented is stranger: he said around 5,000 people wrote asking to go, and every man aboard 'Endurance' came home alive.

Attributed to Ernest Shackleton; no copy of the advert has ever been foundRead card

Next reading modeStillnessIdeas for rest and attention.