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What Chekhov saw in our failure to communicate was something positive and precious: the private silence in which we live, and which enables us to endure our own solitude. We live, as his characters do, beyond any tale we happen to enact. ...we are conscious of the simple persistence of a person's power to live out his life, in this there is no futility. What one is most aware of is the glint of courage.

V.S. Pritchett in New York Times Review of Books June 28. 1973

p.4

Men are tormented by the opinions they have of things, and not by the things themselves. --- (John Florio trans)

Epictetus - inscribed in Greek on one of the beams of Montaigne's library

The focus of Kierkegaards thought is the individual human consciousness, and his most persistent theme is the difficulty of locating any firm reference point in the quicksand of that terrain... man is... a creature of duplicity and doubt, a dissipated being whose life inevitably boils off in theories he can never realize,

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passions he can never satisfy.

NY Review of books Sept 20. 73 J.M. Cameron p14

In art, truth and reality begin when one ceases completely to understand what one is doing.

Matisse

A presumed monopoly on truth obstructs negotiation and accommodation. Good results may be given up in the quest for ever-elusive ideal solutions. Policy makers must understand the crucial importance of timing. Opportunities cannot be hoarded, once past, they are usually irretrievable.

Henry Kissinger

Oct 23. 73 NY Times. p36

...the length of time eyes meet on the street is kept to a minimum so that strangers can assure each other that they will not intrude.

This urban consciousness is the continual turning in on the self for nourishment in a milieu in which a person would go mad if he or she reacted