“Once Ryan asked Kurt, “What are you going to do when you’re thirty?” “I’m not worried about what’s going to happen when I’m thirty,” Kurt replied in the same tone he would use to discuss a broken spark plug, “because I’m never going to make it to thirty. You know what life is like after thirty”
“Morgan’s argument that prehistoric societies practiced group marriage (also known as the primal horde or omnigamy”
“But my point applies to a broader audience. Indulge me in one more thought experiment, a familiar one: You will be stranded on a desert island, and you can take just 10 books and 10 music CDs. What do you choose? My prediction is that even people who don’t listen to classical music regularly will take Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Even people who haven’t picked up Shakespeare in years will take the collected works of Shakespeare. When we want something we can go back to again and again, we choose the same giants that the experts choose. My proposition about the literature, music, and visual arts of the last half century is that hardly any of it has enough substance to satisfy, over time. The post-1950 West has unquestionably produced some wonderful entertainments, and I do not mean wonderful slightingly. The Simpsons is wickedly smart, Saving Private Ryan is gripping, Groundhog Day is a brilliant moral fable. The West’s popular culture is for my money the only contemporary culture worth patronizing, with its best stories more compelling and revealing than the ones written by authors who purport to write serious novels, and its best popular music with more energy and charm than anything the academic composers turn out. It is a mixed bag, with the irredeemably vulgar side by side, sometimes intermingled, with the wittiest and most thoughtful work. But the quality is often first-rate”
“Or think of Darwin, working for decades on his theory of evolution, refraining from publishing it because it wasn’t yet perfect. Hardly anyone knew what he was working on. No one said, Hey Charles, it’s okay that you’re taking so long, because what you’re working on is just so important. They didn’t know. He couldn’t have known. He just knew that it wasn’t done yet, that it could be better, and that that was enough to keep him going.””
Charles S. Ryan was a British author and surgeon, best known for his vivid accounts of his experiences during the Russo-Turkish War. His notable work, 'Under the Red Crescent: Adventures of an English...
“Sebastian and Ryan took me to my first gay bars””
“Whenever I visited Sebastian and Ryan in Chicago, they took me to the gay-friendly Catholic church they attended. I fell in love with it and promised myself that if I ever moved to Chicago, I would attend this church because there was nothing like it back home.””
“Captain Miller lay close by where he had been hit, his back slumped against the bridge’s wall. Ryan, in anguish, was alone with his rescuer in the final moments before Miller died. Ryan watched as the captain struggled in his last moments, shot clean through one lung. The captain wouldn’t take another breath, except to grunt, “James. Earn this … earn it.” Were these dying words a final order or charge? Private Ryan has always taken it that way. These memories rivet the aged James Ryan, who now finds himself staring at the grave marker and mumbling to his dead commander. He tells Captain Miller that his family is with him. He confesses that he wasn’t sure how he would feel about coming to the cemetery today. He wants Captain Miller to know that every day of his life he’s thought of their conversation at the bridge, of Miller’s dying words. Ryan has tried to live a good life, and he hopes he has. At least in the captain’s eyes, he hopes he’s “earned it,” that his life has been worthy of the sacrifice Captain Miller and the other men made of giving their lives for his. As Ryan mutters these thoughts, he cannot help wondering how any life, however well lived, could be worthy of his friends’ sacrifice. The old man stands up, but he doesn’t feel released. The question remains unanswered. His wife comes to his side again. He looks at her and pleads, “Tell me I’ve led a good life.” Confused by his request, she responds with a question: “What?” He has to know the answer. He tries to articulate it again: “Tell me I’m a good man.” The request flusters her, but his earnestness makes her think better of putting it off. With great dignity, she says, “You are.””
“I do not even want to see your inventory,” replied Shart, as he concentrated for a moment. “Good shit, the first thing listed is 273 pieces of lint.” “I think you may have the filters set too low,” I replied, toying with my inventory. The world around me slowed, leaving Badgelor in a particularly corpse-tastic moment. I disabled a few settings; suddenly, I had everything from lint to pubic hair in my inventory. Wait a minute. Not all the pubic hair was mine. “How did Badgelor’s hair get there?” I asked. That’s more than a little appalling. “He likes to shrink and sleep in your pants while you’re bathing,” replied the demon. “He says it makes him feel safe. I’m assuming he feels that way because he forgets you are an incompetent idiot.” I rotated my head around to look Shart full in the face. Considering he was on my shoulder, we were quite literally eye to eye. I raised my eyebrows questioningly. Shart had the good grace to look away. “When Badgelor was very small, he used to do the same thing with Charles. Baby Badgelor liked warm snuggles and familiar smells.” “That Charles guy really messed with his head,” I stated, remembering a few cats I’d had that were the same way. It was hard to imagine Badgelor actually doing that, however. He seemed a bit more… violently insane. When Badgelor finally had his fill, he crawled out of the pile of less than fresh corpses with a grin. “Ready?” “Yup,” I stated. “Back to the creek, clean yourself up, and take a nap.” He nodded contentedly and trotted off. “If you knew he was going to do that, why did you bring him here?” asked Shart. “It made him happy,” I stated. “In case you hadn’t noticed, he’s kind of violently insane.””
“Do yourself a favor and run down the list of businesses started during depressions or economic crises. Fortune magazine (ninety days after the market crash of 1929) FedEx (oil crisis of 1973) UPS (Panic of 1907) Walt Disney Company (After eleven months of smooth operation, the twelfth was the market crash of 1929.) Hewlett-Packard (Great Depression, 1935) Charles Schwab (market crash of 1974–75) Standard Oil (Rockefeller bought out his partners in what became Standard Oil and took over in February 1865, the final year of the Civil War.) Coors (Depression of 1873) Costco (recession in the late 1970s) Revlon (Great Depression, 1932) General Motors (Panic of 1907) Procter & Gamble (Panic of 1837) United Airlines (1929) Microsoft (recession in 1973–75) LinkedIn (2002, post–dot-com bubble) For the most part, these businesses had little awareness they were in some historically significant depression. Why? Because the founders were too busy existing in the present”
“In the words of Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, it was “an episode which belongs to the poetry of history.””