The ecstasy of agony is now clichéd: everyone has heard — though not from Nietzsche, surely — that what does not kill them makes them stronger, and “No pain, no gain” is the mantra of fitness buffs and corporate raiders alike. But we know the lessons of psychology. Harlow’s monkeys rarely recover from their deprivations; they bury their heads and scream and scream. So much that is precious is also fragile, and only ashes emerge from some crucibles.And a description that can be read with this article that talks of the growing use of solitary confinement:
To grasp the indifference of the universe is one thing; to understand the open malevolence of an entire society of human beings is quite another. In the segregation cell, you are confronted with the terrible confluence of both. The world is narrowed to a single dirty room. However many times you are moved, the room is always the same; only the dirt is different. The days are the same as well, and they operate on the same, repeated plan. The food comes in on a tray, the tray goes out. The brief gleam of our lives between dark eternities seems not glimmer but dingy waste. The self and the spirit, you come to realize, do not exist deep within, but extend far beyond you; they exist only through the connection with all of that with which you share an interest.
Saw David Eggers last night at the beautiful Playhouse Square in Cleveland (thanks to Harrison Kalodimos and friends). Wonderfully entertaining and inspiring, especially the questions asked by the eighth-graders in the room. Appropriate, given Eggers' project, 826 National, which provides sanctuaries in various cities across the country where kids can get one-on-one attention for their creative writing. To meet the commercial coding restrictions of their first location, they opened a pirate supply store. Supply-needing pirates fund the center, and the kids get to do creative writing amidst glass eyes and buccaneer swords and planks sized for humans, parrots, and... kittens. As Eggers said, kids who walk into a creative writing hideaway through a pirate shop know that "these people know how my strange brain works."And why? Because Peretz has a lot of wealthy and well-connected friends. Bear in mind that in 2003 Harvard suspended and eventually returned a $2.5 million dollar gift from the president of the United Arab Emirates, after it learned that he was connected to a think tank that had sponsored talks featuring anti-Semitic and anti-American themes. As the Harvard Crimson said at the time, "no donation is worth indebting the university to practitioners of hate and bigotry." So the University clearly has some standards, it just doesn't apply them consistently.For all my Harvard friends, you can find the petition here:

How can the goal, the moment, and the path converge?
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