After-Orts #71
Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.
— Savielly Tartakower, chess Grandmaster (1887-1956)
— quoted in Jamie Raskin, Unthinkable, epigraph to Chapter 13
I am playing perfect music, on a perfect Stradivarius cello, with a perfect Tourte bow, in a perfect space. The only element of failure that can intrude and ruin it all is-- me.
-- Steven Isserlis, on performing a Bach Suite at Wigmore Hall, London; in his book The Bach Cello Suites: A Companion, part 4
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The Meaning Of Life...
https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/09/17/the-meaning-of-life/
...has haunted humanity since the dawn of existence.... In 1988, the editors of LIFE magazine posed this grand question head-on to 300 “wise men and women"...
Among the responses:
Annie Dillard: We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed.... We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.
Stephen Jay Gould: The human species has inhabited this planet for only 250,000 years or so -- roughly .0015 percent of the history of life, the last inch of the cosmic mile. The world fared perfectly well without us for all but the last moment of earthly time–and this fact makes our appearance look more like an accidental afterthought than the culmination of a prefigured plan.
John Updike: Ancient religion and modern science agree: we are here to give praise. Or, to slightly tip the expression, to pay attention.... What we beyond doubt do have is our instinctive intellectual curiosity about the universe from the quasars down to the quarks, our wonder at existence itself, and an occasional surge of sheer blind gratitude for being here.
John Cage: No why. Just here.