This bullet is an old one.
“In 1897, it was fired at the president of Uruguay by a young man from Montevideo, Avelino Arredondo, who had spent long weeks without seeing anyone so that the world might know that he acted alone. Thirty years earlier, Lincoln had been murdered by that same ball, by the criminal or magical hand of an actor transformed by the words of Shakespeare into Marcus Brutus, Caesar’s murderer. In the mid-seventeenth century, vengeance had employed it for the assassination of Sweden’s Gustavus Adolphus in the midst of the public hecatomb of battle.
“In earlier times, the bullet had been other things, because Pythagorean metempsychosis is not reserved for humankind alone. It was the silken cord given to viziers in the East, the rifles and bayonets that cut down the defenders of the Alamo, the triangular blade that slit a queen’s throat, the wood of the Cross and the dark nails that pierced the flesh of the Redeemer, the poison kept by the Carthaginian chief in an iron ring on his finger, the serene goblet that Socarates drank down one evening.
“In the dawn of time it was the stone that Cain hurled at Abel, and in the future it shall be many things that we cannot even imagine today, but that will be able to put an end to men and their wondrous, fragile life.”
”Borges, In Memorian JFK
Like last year, like next year, this year. A poem to lost life.
(via pbarbieri)
Romantic composer Robert Schumann in 1850.
“Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.” -Kurt Vonnegut.
“We are each a world in ourselves, and the pleasantest world is of our own creation. To be domiciled in a ready-made world which may be a misfit may cause you to carry it as a burden instead of living happily in it. Then there is the beaten path—the one that the millions travel and along which the opportunities have to be divided into such minute parts that to the many who must share them they are invisible. Strike out for a new road, and travel on it and help build it into a great highway, and share in the benefits that follow. Take your ambition and abilities to a suitable field of activity. Go there with a fixed purpose, a determination to succeed; acquaint yourself with its tradition and past experience, so as not to be surprised or discouraged by obstructions that may only be blocking the way to a great treasure, placed there that the timid, the faint-hearted, the indolent, the undeserving may not secure it.”
“For what are you preparing yourself—the newspaper of yesterday, the newspaper of today or the newspaper of tomorrow? If you are being taught in terms of yesterday or today, I wish to say to you that tomorrow is something more than another day. It is another world. We are on the eve of new ideas and new methods. The inventive genius of man is rapidly extending the use of Nature’s powers and resources. Tomorrow is truly a new world, and not more so in anything else than in the profession of journalism. What is of interest on the morrow is what makes the live, interesting newspaper. Tomorrow is where the newspaper man lives and views the multifarious activities of mankind.”
“It does not require much stretch of imagination to expect that reporters will in the near future carry with them some kind of portable wireless telephone and thus keep in touch with their offices. So, again I say, prepare for the morrow!”
“Do not live in the past. Be up and doing. Be alive. It is said that an undertaker in Philadelphia displays a sign which reads, ‘Why go around half dead when I will bury you for $37.50?’”
“The best a man takes to his grave is that which he wisely gave away.”
Adolph Ochs and his daughter Iphigene, 1902.
STEVE JOBS, in a commencement address at Stanford, 2005.
(via the Wall Street Journal)
The ultimate deadline.
(via thedeadline)
Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? NYTimes.com (via somethingchanged)
Great life lessons here.
(via mikehudack)
(via thedeadline)
