Peter McLaughlin (@herfingersbloomed): "This is such a common thing. Other examples include: the windmills in Don Quixote; ‘history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’ and ‘God [is] a shout in the street’ from Ulysses. I’ve actually heard that, despite his incessant praising of Joyce, when Hemingway died t…"

Make money doing the work you believe in

This is such a common thing. Other examples include: the windmills in Don Quixote; ‘history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’ and ‘God [is] a shout in the street’ from Ulysses. I’ve actually heard that, despite his incessant praising of Joyce, when Hemingway died they found his copy of Ulysses and most of the pages after the start were literally still uncut. People like making references to things they’ve only read the start of lol

The butterfly is to Zhuangzi what the madeline is to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (or linen is to Marx’s Capital); it’s the reference everyone is eager to make, to signal that they are in the know…but it actually appears quite early on! If you want to be that guy or girl at the party, obnoxiously perseverating on your superior knowledge of Zhuangzi, my recommendation is to instead reference the worthless tree, a character that appears in chapter 4 and again in chapter 20.

Celine Nguyen

Apr 22

3:42 PM

Make money doing the work you believe in

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