On Our Better Nature...

"Sherwin Nuland, the clinical professor of surgery at Yale who wrote How We Die, writes in The Art of Aging, "Man is the only animal to have been granted the ability to continue developing during the later periods of life, and much of this depends on seeing oneself as the kind of person who can overcome the tendency to do otherwise." 

"I look at what I write so I can see what I think."

I read this article on writing and found much of myself in the paragraph from Jonathan Safran Foer:

"I begin with nothing and I unfortunately usually end with nothing, in terms of the day-to-day process," says Jonathan Safran Foer. "I’ve never had characters before I started writing.  I’ve never had a moral.  I’ve never had a story to tell.  I’ve never had some voice that I found and wanted to share.  Auden, the poet, said, 'I look at what I write so I can see what I think.'  And that’s been very true for me in my process.  I don’t have a thought that I then try to articulate.  It’s only through the act of writing that I try to find my own thoughts.  So, it can be quite scary because you know, it’s... there’s a kind of faith, I guess, that you have to have either in yourself or in the process that something good will come from filling blank pages." 

As Robert Capa, one of the founders of the agency Magnum Photos, once put it: Arnold's work "falls metaphorically between Marlene Dietrich's legs and the bitter lives of migratory potato pickers."

Photojournalist Eve Arnold Dies At 99