Dire Warnings #4:

This contention holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. I call this contention astonishing because in whatever way we define the concept of civilization it is a certain fact that all things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilization.

Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, Ch 2, (p 38 in the 1989 WW Norton Edition, translated by James Strachey)

Dire Warnings #3:

The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.

Journals, May 24, 1847, written on the eve of Emerson's forty-forth birthday. According to the footnote (Vol XVII, p.277) Emerson considered it one of his best sentences, but had no memory of writing it.

Dire Warnings #2

For External Use Only.

Dire Warnings #1

From The Death of Ivan Ilyich:

It's as though I was going steadily downhill when I imagined I was going up.

A Smart Man, A Good Book

In the grand reading room of the public library, writers and researchers sit beside less experienced students of the English language. Yesterday, in a moment of frustration I found myself reading over the shoulder of the Korean girl beside me. It was a beginner’s English text book, the kind designed to give an unstuffy introduction to basic grammar and vocabulary. “Look!” it announced:

A PEN ....................... A BLUE PEN
A MAN ........................ A SMART MAN
A BOOK ....................... A GOOD BOOK

I was using a black pen, but I wanted very badly for everything else to be true. Only at that moment it didn’t seem to be a very book that I was writing – and had been writing for years now – it seemed like a mediocre book that I was incapable of finishing. Maybe if I were a smart man, I thought. A smart man could write a good book.
Further down the page, there was an even darker omen:

Do you have a bad teacher?
A stupid teacher?
A bad book?
A big apartment?

For once, I took comfort in the fact that I do not have a big apartment. Maybe there was still hope.