Keepin' Emily company

[Bekah]

On Jan 3, 2013, at 4:48 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> I suspect that mistakes are undervalued and that the right answer and
> getting things right is given far too much weight.

“He was remembering something Günter Grass had once said to him about losing:  that it taught you more profound lessons than winning did.  The victors believed themselves and their worldviews justified and validated and learned nothing.  The losers had to reevaluate everything they had thought to be true and worth fighting for, and so had a chance of learning, the hard way, the deepest lessons life had to teach. The first thing he learned was that now he knew where the bottom was.  When you hit bottom you knew how deep the water you were in really was. And you knew that you never wanted to be there again. 

“He was beginning to learn the lesson that would set him free: that to be imprisoned by the need to be loved was to be sealed in a cell in which one experienced an interminable torment and from which there was no escape.   He needed to understand that there were people who would never love him. No matter how carefully he explained his work or clarified his intentions in creating it, they would not love him.”

Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie

Bek