This is one of my favorite things about Denmark. Me and the kids go down to the library after closing several days a week. Also, it is free to order books from other libraries and have them delivered, so we effectively have a well stocked university library in our village.
When I was out running last night, I stumbled upon 4 long haired cows in a clearing. They looked at me as if we were in Western shootout, no one moving. Slowly, I walked toward the one closest, but it got scared and ran off, so I stopped, and sat down. After a while it got curious and came over to me, sniffing at my knee. We looked each other in the eyes; the sense of being confronted with another consciousness. The smell of fur, the musk, the wetness of its muzzle. The other cows looked on, su…
When I was younger, I severally underestimated how valuable it is to compound, to focus in on a few things and do them well. There are things you can only discover 10,000 hours into a conversation with your best friend, experiences you can only have two decades into honing a craft or living in the same place. It takes dedication to not become blasé to the things we have around us, to maintain the serious attention and dedication necessary to discover new levels to something. But those levels ar…
When thing I’ve learned over the last few years is how much better good prose gets if I read at half my normal pace. I can understand most prose at 400 words per minute or so, but good prose gets really hallucogenic if I read a sentence, close my eyes and imagine it / think about what it implies / remember similar things in my life, and then open my eyes and read another sentence. It works best with prose that is very precise and layered.
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Reading Yukio Mishima for the first time. So good!
What are the best things written about 4o?
It’s a strange new phenomenon. We’ve seen mass grief before based on the death of celebrity with whom large numbers of people have a parasocial relationship. But not mass grief at the death of a digital “person” with whom large numbers of people have a direct relationship
A curated list of many of my past projects:
A real estate website focused entirely on selling monasteries, retreats etc, with the wonderful and hilarious name "Find the Divine":
I enjoyed these notes on my notes on Tanya Luhrmann’s “How God Becomes Real”, especially the connections to Aristotle and practice.
(Now someone needs to write notes on these notes on my notes…)
New essay in ~3 h
This is one of my favorite things about Denmark. Me and the kids go down to the library after closing several days a week. Also, it is free to order books from other libraries and have them delivered, so we effectively have a well stocked university library in our village.
May 25
at
5:55 a.m.
My blog would not be possible without this, there is no way I would be able to afford buying all of the obscure books I have to read in order to do my research, and I couldn’t afford to live close to a university library if that was the only place to borrow them
I’m curious if you need to pay for your library membership in Denmark?
I’ve recently learned that in the Netherlands it’s a monthly subscription, which I’m a bit sad about mainly because I’ve gone most of my life having free access to libraries in the US (included in my taxes) that I haven’t taken much advantage of.
Now instead I find myself seeking out local little book swaps since I’ve already said ‘yes’ to too many monthly services.
Cool.
Related notes
When I was younger, I severally underestimated how valuable it is to compound, to focus in on a few things and do them well. There are things you can only discover 10,000 hours into a conversation with your best friend, experiences you can only have two decades into honing a craft or living in the same place. It takes dedication to not become blasé to the things we have around us, to maintain the serious attention and dedication necessary to discover new levels to something. But those levels are, in many ways, more rewarding than the rewards of doing new stuff (as fun as that is, and as important as it is to have that as part of the mix).
When thing I’ve learned over the last few years is how much better good prose gets if I read at half my normal pace. I can understand most prose at 400 words per minute or so, but good prose gets really hallucogenic if I read a sentence, close my eyes and imagine it / think about what it implies / remember similar things in my life, and then open my eyes and read another sentence. It works best with prose that is very precise and layered.
When I was out running last night, I stumbled upon 4 long haired cows in a clearing. They looked at me as if we were in Western shootout, no one moving. Slowly, I walked toward the one closest, but it got scared and ran off, so I stopped, and sat down. After a while it got curious and came over to me, sniffing at my knee. We looked each other in the eyes; the sense of being confronted with another consciousness. The smell of fur, the musk, the wetness of its muzzle. The other cows looked on, su…
Henrik Karlsson restacked
Learn to take your time.
Read big, fat books. Put days into making cookies; months into growing a plant. Write for hours. Study well. Take the long way home. Listen to that old man tell his life story until he’s done.
Stop rushing.
Life is not wasted when you live it with everything you’ve got.
i don’t really watch TV but when i do i like to watch the most fucked up dating reality TV shows ever, like
MILF Manor: moms and sons date other moms and sons
Naked and Afraid of Love: survive in the wilderness naked and also dating
I Wanna Marry Harry: tricked a bunch of american girls into thinking they were competing to date prince harry
Farmer Wants a Wife: city girls are carted in to live on a farm and date farmers
How Americans aged 25-35 spend their free time, 1920-2026. A shift toward ever more leisure and solitude. The most underrated change is the loss of time spent “doing nothing” (i.e. thinking).
researching this post was so much fun!! i hope reading it leaves you more curious and appreciative of the world 🙂
De-slopping a popular Simone Weil quote I see frequently do the rounds on Substack/X:
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”
I suspect people love to repost this because it fits very nicely into the banal zeitgeist of mindfulness good and phone/AI-bot-bad, go touch grass instead rah-rah. But this quote actually captures a …
overheard a girl say ‘worrying is such a terrible use of your imagination’ … and I audibly gasped.
efficiency is not a christian virtue
nor is mere optimization, utility, or output.
humans are not machines, we are not simply consumers nor producers, and when we strip our :
art and architecture, our cities and education, or, God forbid, our churches, down to function or profit, we lose something truly human.
and in this, our modern time, our culture has ordered its worldview around efficiency.
it’s why people will use AI to write or read or generate art.
Reading Yukio Mishima for the first time. So good!
What are we reading this weekend?
“Looking for Alice” seems to be going viral again (not sure where!)—it is interesting how something you wrote long ago, in what feels like a different era of your life, can still have life and go around interacting with strangers.
When I was younger, I severally underestimated how valuable it is to compound, to focus in on a few things and do them well. There are things you can only discover 10,000 hours into a conversation with your best friend, experiences you can only have two decades into honing a craft or living in the same place. It takes dedication to not become blasé to the things we have around us, to maintain the serious attention and dedication necessary to discover new levels to something. But those levels are, in many ways, more rewarding than the rewards of doing new stuff (as fun as that is, and as important as it is to have that as part of the mix).
May 24
at
1:35 p.m.
100%, "settling down" and committing more deeply to my craft, relationships, and spiritual practice has compounded my happiness more than all the constant wandering and reinvention I did in my younger years. Kierkegaard viewed repetition as a “landing” in freedom; instead of compulsively seeking novelty, a more grounded existence allows us to take ownership of our lives and serve others. Not that we shouldn't explore and experiment, but meaning and expertise don't arise from questing alone, but from eventually returning and reintegrating.
The deeper you go in a subject matter (or relationship), the more detailed and interconnected the tapestry of crosslinks that “domain” makes with others. This is the birthplace of insights.
People underestimate this. Also in the case of relationships or living in a specific place for decades
Well said! I feel like “Shiny Object Syndrome” is more pervasive now than ever with all the AI tools. 100% of the entrepreneurs I’ve seen fall victim to this ultimately failed to reach their end goal. I’ve always found it ironic that the acronym for it is SOS 🤔
It’s amazing how many answers come from being down in the proverbial weeds.
Distraction is a choice made by men who lack the discipline to master their own attention.
Reading this to my wife and daughter on a monday morning. Beautiful mindset to begin the week with!
as James McMurtry wrote about cashing in on a thirty-year crush, “you can’t be young and do that”
There are dimensions of friendship, craft, and place that only become visible after enough time has passed for familiarity itself to deepen into understanding.
Nothing new here.
Segmentation is corporate group think; slavery and molding. Being multi disciplined, that is having multiple skill sets by being all things to all people is more fun with KAIZEN — the daily % improvement in many skills which compounds over time.
The most prominent of these for me recently is staying in the same place. My default tendency is to move away and start over, but there is so much value in building a life where you already are
C.S Lewis says this exact thing in Mere Christianity, about marriage I think
I like how your examples for 10k hours here are towards people and places
Related notes
When thing I’ve learned over the last few years is how much better good prose gets if I read at half my normal pace. I can understand most prose at 400 words per minute or so, but good prose gets really hallucogenic if I read a sentence, close my eyes and imagine it / think about what it implies / remember similar things in my life, and then open my eyes and read another sentence. It works best with prose that is very precise and layered.
When I was out running last night, I stumbled upon 4 long haired cows in a clearing. They looked at me as if we were in Western shootout, no one moving. Slowly, I walked toward the one closest, but it got scared and ran off, so I stopped, and sat down. After a while it got curious and came over to me, sniffing at my knee. We looked each other in the eyes; the sense of being confronted with another consciousness. The smell of fur, the musk, the wetness of its muzzle. The other cows looked on, su…
Learn to take your time.
Read big, fat books. Put days into making cookies; months into growing a plant. Write for hours. Study well. Take the long way home. Listen to that old man tell his life story until he’s done.
Stop rushing.
Life is not wasted when you live it with everything you’ve got.
“Looking for Alice” seems to be going viral again (not sure where!)—it is interesting how something you wrote long ago, in what feels like a different era of your life, can still have life and go around interacting with strangers.
Relevant people
