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Posts tagged "life as a story"
LIFE magazine feature on Dennis Hopper, June 19, 1970
Beautiful quote from Hopper about his upbringing in Kansas and the magical impact that a visit to the movie theater had on him:
When I was little, I lived on a farm near Dodge City, Kansas. Wheat fields all around, as far as you could see. No neighbors, no other kids. Just a train that came through once a day. I used to spend hours wondering where it came from and where it went to. Then when I was about five my grandmother put some eggs in her apron and we walked five miles to town and she sold the eggs and took me to my first movie. And right away it hit me—the places I was seeing on the screen were the places the train came from and went to! The world on the screen was the real world, and I felt as if my heart would explode I wanted so much to be a part of it.
God, this hits a chord, with all the book proofing I’ve been doing. Wonder if Schulz (no stranger to depression) got depressed around the holidays, too?
“In some ways, I think it’s all about casting yourself as the hero of a story and then backing it up with action.” - @johntunger
The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt.
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Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity, and the naked 3 A.M. terror of regret.
The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is, in effect, a non-repeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, “Light Years,” James Salter writes: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.” Watching our peers’ lives is the closest we can come to a glimpse of the parallel universes in which we didn’t ruin that relationship years ago, or got that job we applied for, or got on that plane after all. It’s tempting to read other people’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately — whenever meg and I are faced with a really difficult, life-altering decision, I sometimes think, “What would make the better story?”
My cousin asked me a few days ago if I had any advice for her grad school interviews. I told her to think about her story: where she’s been, where she wants to go, and how grad school would fit in to that story.
If she couldn’t come up with a coherent story, then she probably shouldn’t go to grad school!


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