Dansite

I thought I had read Death of a Salesman, but having read the whole play today, I think maybe I just knew the story. Very powerful.

At the end, the dreamed voice of his brother Ben as Willy makes his choice. "It's dark there, but full of diamonds."

I seem to have made myself a special day for having just read Letters to a Young Poet. Full of wisdom and thought provoking ideas on art and the nature/benefits of solitude. Also unexpected expositions on sex and sexuality.

Loved The Letter from the Young Worker which ends the book. The idea (if you are inclined toward the divine) that one should not let Christianity separate you from God.

“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?”

~ John Steinbeck, East of Eden

What do you have a better chance of being able to open? A computer file you created 12 years ago, or a book that was written 400 years ago. Get books. Read them and you will be reminded of parts of yourself that deserve to be remembered and appreciated.