”The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. As they say in the United States: “to be different is to be indecent.” The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.

I recently stumbled up a thirteen-year-old blog post by the always-insightful arts thinker Diane Ragdale, who tragically passed away less than a year ago. (You could do a lot worse than to spend time working through her ArtsJournal blog Jumper from beginning to end.) The post I’m looking at here is entitled “How to avoid a strip-mall future for the arts sector: Lessons from the boutique label, Pi”, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that just about every paragraph provides an insight that could instantly make our theater system better.

“Murdoch believed we should cultivate a kind of ‘mindfulness’. By making a habit of focusing our attention on everyday things that are valuable or virtuous, we hone our ability to act well at decisive moments. ‘Anything that alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness will do,’ she wrote.” John-Paul Flintoff, How to Change the World referring to philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch

“Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable.” Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream I feel seen.

The winter begins!

“I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.” Oliver Sacks, Gratitude

“The arts can turn a piece of banal knowledge into a truth that has the power to move us, when a hundred propositions leave us cold.” Susan Neiman, The Left Is Not Woke

“Although Goethe was intimately connected to the social and cultural life of his time, he also knew how to maintain his individuality. His principle was to take in only as much of the world as he could process. Whatever he could not respond to in a productive way he chose to disregard. In other words, he was an expert at ignoring things.” RUDIGER SAFRANSKI Goethe: Life as a Work of Art

“Resistance is first of all a matter of principle and a way to live, to make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit.” Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

Ian Leslie, on his Substack site The Ruffian, wrote an interesting article entitled “Are You Charismatic or Charming?". It made me start considering my teaching and writing style. Leslie writes: In a new book, Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics, the sociologist Julia Sonnevend argues that charm has superseded charisma to become the dominant political style of the twenty-first century. Charm thrives on proximity; on a sense that the politician would be at ease with the voter in person.