It occurred to me that, rather than constantly refer to the poem that contains the line that inspired my book, I should just give it to you.
Here, then, is Rudyard Kipling’s If, in text and in video, read by Dennis Hopper. I’ve highlighted the lines that popped into my head that day when I had [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘disaster’
November 10, 2008
Kipling’s If
November 10, 2008
Postscript on McCain
Read David Grann in The New Yorker on what I consider an epic, a Greek, a heart-rending tragedy: the transformation, under pressure, of a great man, John McCain.
This is a man who was once “more at peace when he was losing” and who, above all, was afraid only of one thing: losing his honor.
Thinking in [...]
October 15, 2008
Uncle Lulu
That guy with the cigar on this West German stamp from 1987 is my great-uncle, Ludwig Erhard, or “Onkel Lulu” in our family.
Why is he on this blog?
Well, I’ve been posting a lot about writing and language and style recently, all of which of course has a lot to do with the writing of my [...]
October 6, 2008
Our election, Napoleon, and that map again
Remember that famous and superb map of the impostor success that I wrote about the other day? Well, it depicted Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, and how it went from triumph to disaster, which is one of the twin themes I explore in my book. There is a famous picture of Napoleon’s retreat. And now The [...]
September 26, 2008
A map of the impostor Success
Above is one of the most famous–perhaps the most famous–map and chart of all time (via the Wikimedia Commons). It is too small in my post, so please click through to the image. Its French caption begins:
Figurative Map of the successive losses in men of the French Army in the Russian campaign 1812-1813. Drawn up [...]
September 1, 2008
The suffering of Frida Kahlo
I popped into the Frida Kahlo exhibition currently at the San Francisco MOMA. Mainly, to see her piercing paintings–and boy, do they pierce–but also, at least in part, as research for my book.
A friend of ours, Erika Lessey Chen, had suggested Kahlo to me a year ago as a possible life-story to look into. I [...]
August 22, 2008
Which Bhagavad Gita?
“With no desire for success, no anxiety about failure, indifferent to results, he burns up his actions in the fire of wisdom. Surrendering all thoughts of outcome, unperturbed, self-reliant, he does nothing at all, even when fully engaged in actions.
There is nothing that he expects, nothing that he fears. Serene, free from possessions, untainted, acting [...]
August 4, 2008
Two great Russians
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has died, and his happens to be one of the lives I’ve been researching for one chapter of my book. (Lots of reversals between disaster and triumph, obviously, including some non-obvious and subtle ones.)
This won’t make sense out of context, but I’m pairing him not only with Hannibal but also with another great [...]
July 24, 2008
Impostor Failure, Part II: J.K. Rowling
In my post on Steve Jobs, I suggested that his biggest failure in life turned out–certainly in his own opinion–to be a liberating event that made possible his subsequent success. In other words, his failure was an impostor, just as Rudyard Kipling would say. In this post, I want to suggest the exact same thing, [...]
July 22, 2008
Impostor Disaster, part I: Steve Jobs
Back to the book: Remember, the whole book is a long story woven around Rudyard Kipling’s poetic insight that triumph and disaster are impostors. I want to lead up to the main character, Hannibal, with a few other examples, and today Steve Jobs comes to mind. I saw him on a stage last month, launching [...]
