Traveler, there is no road; you make your own path as you walk.

In the end, the Syntopicon would require over 400,000 man-hours of reading[4] and cost over two million dollars.

The process of cataloging each appearance of one of the “Great Ideas” in all 431 works by 71 authors in the collection was so arduous that the Syntopicon nearly did not make it to print. Before it even came time to print, the budget had topped a million dollars and there was not even “a penny for paper” left.

He worked with a team of over 100 readers who met twice a week for years to discuss the readings and the ideas within them. Among his editorial team was a young Saul Bellow.

On Notes, there’s no one looking after your brain. There’s no one protecting you from clickbait and softcore thirst traps. There’s no one deciding what’s worth your time. In fact, the algorithm especially doesn’t care. It wants to steal your time.

AC: So what are you being paid for? RR: The confidence that I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel has proven helpful for artists.

I no longer see “being creative” as something I do when I have a camera in hand, or when I sit down at my computer. Creativity is absolutely found in everyday tasks and how one approaches the world and their place in it. It is absolutely a way of being, as Mr. Rubin’s book explains wonderfully. It seems a very calming and empowering place to be.

One of my primary takeaways from The Creative Act is the importance of being open. Open to new ideas, open to new approaches, open to being wrong. When one is proactively open, as I have been practicing, navigating the world becomes a bit more pleasant. I find myself more respectful of the creative efforts of others, and more a part of their community. I feel a kinship with anyone trying to make something creative, no matter how successful a given output may be. Making something is the essential first step toward making something great.

Still, I can’t help but think that people’s priorities are enormously out of touch with what will actually matter most to their future selves. It feels as if people seem to have this mental model where medical progress simply happens. Like there’s some natural law of the universe that says “treatments improve by X% per year” and we’re all just passengers with a dumb grin on this predetermined trajectory. They see headlines about better FDA guidelines or CRISPR or immunotherapy or AI-accelerated protein folding and think, “Great, the authorities got it covered. By the time I need it, they’ll have figured it out.”. But that’s not how any of this works! Nobody has it covered! Medical progress happens because specific people chose to work on specific problems instead of doing something else with their finite time on Earth.

Their eyes are slowly decaying, and that if they manage to hit fifty, there is a one-in-ten chance that there will be a creaking, incurable black hole in the middle of their sight, expanding day after day. Think! Think! Do something about it!

To be fair, most people go through their first few decades of life not completely cognizant how terrible modern medicine can be.

Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message: there are formal limits to myth, there are no 'substantial' ones.

The concept is a constituting element of myth: if I want to decipher myths, I must somehow be able to name concepts. The dictionary supplies me with a few: Goodness, Kindness, Wholeness, Humaneness, etc.

The signifier of myth presents itself in an ambiguous way: it is at the same time meaning and form, full on one side and empty on the other. As meaning, the signifier already postulates a reading, I grasp it through my eyes, it has a sensory reality (unlike the linguistic signifier, which is purely mental), there is a richness in it

What is characteristic of myth? To transform a meaning into form. In other words, myth is always a language-robbery.