ABOUT
A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art. One must accept it. For this reason I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.
-On Blindness by Jorge Luis Borges
I am convinced that most books are letters to the future … Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky) The Icicle
Think in the Morning email: dhj@thinkinthemorning.com
This is a place to read the stories I write about food, money, words and more, about people, about places and things, maybe even about you if you passed through Mendocino over the past forty years or so–a bit of history, a little fiction, a few memories. The Sea Gull Restaurant of Mendocino in the 70s and 80s was a popular place when the town was growing from a sleepy coastal village to a tourist destination. Think in the Morning also posts essays on anything we feel may be of interest to you including investing, politics, current affairs, Mexico, literature and more. Judge for yourself if it’s worth your time. Give it a try. Let us know. Welcome to our site.
Think in the morning is one of William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell. Like his Auguries of Innocence, his Proverbs have taught me much. I’ll have more to say of Blake in these pages and of other poets and authors too.
Quotes:
I think the anxiety comes from knowing I have no real qualifications to write as I do. Not a philosopher or sociologist, not a real professor of literature or film, not a political scientist, professional music critic or trained journalist. I’m employed in an MFA program, but have no MFA myself, and no PhD. My evidence—such as it is—is almost always intimate. Zaide Smith
Nothing can last forever. There isn’t any memory, no matter how intense, that doesn’t fade out at last. Juan Rulfo
A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. Charles Peguy
I am not a novelist, really not even a writer; I am a storyteller. One of my friends said about me that I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them, an perhaps this is not entirely untrue. To me, the explanation of life seems to be its melody, its pattern. And I feel in life such an infinite, truly inconceivable fantasy. Isak Dinesen
Those who write clearly have readers. Albert Camus
Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists. There is, there has been, there will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners—I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem that they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.” Wizlawa Szymborska
To say that any complete denudation of the writer occurs in the successful work is, according to me, a romantic exaggeration. A great part of the art of it is precisely in seeing that this does not happen. . . . Everything has to be subordinated to a whole which is not you. Any story I reveal myself completely in will be a bad story. Flannery O’Connor