I can’t remember exactly how it goes, but there’s a Chinese saying that goes something like, “The memories of three able men still are not like the pen of a fool.” So, I’ve started writing random stuff down on little scraps of paper — I’m that weirdo you see walking around scribbling on the inside of a teabag wrapper against a lamppost. A friend of mine used to keep a little notebook in his shirt pocket for exactly these purposes, but clearly I wouldn’t do this even if my shirts had pockets.

The question always then becomes, when I am actually going to copy those notes down into where they are meant to finally go — whether a calendar, or this blog, or whatever. So to flesh out what was written on the tea bag:

On Wednesday I went to a talk by a biographer of Nechama Leibowitz, quite on a whim (well, a classmate spontaneously invited me), and even though I was holding my laptop in my lap the entire time, since I hadn’t had time to put it away, for the first time in a very long time indeed I was captivated enough by the talk and respected the speaker enough that I would not even think of checking my email while she was speaking. It’s interesting in itself that it was a talk about Nechama at Drisha, and many of the audience there had themselves been in a class taught by Nechama back in the day. Nechama Leibowitz was in many ways an epitome of Litvish outlook, and coincidentally a Chassidish acquaintance of mine, when told what I was learning, recently said, “Oy, they’re making a thorough misnaged of you out there.”

While clearly I have never aligned myself with the Chassidic crowd, and while I am a big proponent of the wholly intellectual approach, I still felt some degree of alienation from the portrayal of true-to-her-roots Nechama, who was thoroughly suspicious of all things mystical and ecstatic. Okay, so maybe I’m not such a fan of the mystical, either — or, at all, should I say — but the ecstatic, that I do connect with. I recently told a friend exactly what I thought of the intensity of experience: that, although moderation is a virtue, allowing experiences to strike you to the core — that is the full spectrum of living.

At the same time, it is understandable that one might find the ecstatic suspicious because it is dangerous, and might lead a person to commit all sorts of errors of passion. And sure, this is true. My initial turn-off, of course, is that this is exactly my father’s attitude toward being overly passionate about things, and in this respect the last thing I would want is to be like him, and therefore it would be impossible in some ways to be simultaneously more like Nechama and less like my father. And so I arrive at the core of the problem, which is that perhaps thinking about who we want or don’t want to be like is entirely counterproductive to self-improvement.

Indeed, to say, “I don’t want to have Quality X because then I would be like Person A” is completely pointless, because I know exactly what qualities of Person A I don’t want, and because I explicitly don’t want those attributes, adding Quality X to the list will not make me more like a person I don’t want to be. Clearly, I know what I will do and what I will not do — those things don’t change so easily. Beyond that, then what? Codification leads to trouble.

And between the ecstatic and the intellectual, which or what combination is best? Wouldn’t the person who devotes his entire being to one or the other wind up with more of either ecstasy or intellect — whichever he chooses — than the other? Perhaps, perhaps not. Then shouldn’t the question be, what proportion of each yields the greatest combined payoff? I don’t think it’s that difficult. The question to ask is not, “Which is the best combination? Because that’s the one I want,” but rather, “What do I want? Because that one is the best combination.”

What is the best way to organize a binder in which some of the pages flip left to right and some read right to left? Any ideas?

I think maybe the best thing to do might be to have two notebooks: one with sources (right to left) and one with other things (left to right.) Or perhaps one large notebook, opening from both ends? Or should I just leave it with some pages flipping on way and some the other arbitrarily?

is teaching’s a wonderful thing! Its top is made out of rubber! Its bottom is made out of springs!

But really, the wonderul thing is that whenever I teach someone what someone else has taught me, I feel a certain inexplicable closeness with that person who first shared that gem of knowledge with me. I hear his/her voice whispering into my ear, speaking simultaneously with me, as if that knowledge were a grain of eternity in which a fragment of my teacher’s person immortally resides.

The problem with compulsory brunch at Princeton is that it more or less forces people to either find their own breakfast (too lazy to do this), stay up for several hours without eating (not very healthful, and also not that pleasant), or sleep until 11 when one really just wants to get up at a normal hour.

They are apparently the key to having a good day. If I seem to have met a goal early on in the day, the rest of the day becomes suddenly wonderful. For instance, I just realized that AIM’s cute profile options are nothing more than having users write their own format strings. (Wait, is that still the case? I haven’t used AIM in a very long time and don’t intend to use it anytime soon. How the heck did I ever put up with the advertising and the audio ads and all the annoyingness? Wait, do those still exist anymore either?)