Mr Antolini in 'The Catcher in the Rye'

"I'm not trying to tell you," he said, "that only educated and scholarly men are able to contribute something valuable to the world. It's not so. But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they're brilliant and creative to begin with - which unfortunately, is rarely the case - tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end. And - most important - nine times out of ten, they have more humility than the unscholarly thinker."

J.D. Salinger, 'The Catcher in the Rye' (1951)

I've been coming back to this passage for years. It could sound like a counter-argument to Illich's "deschooling" - yet Illich was every bit the scholar. His response would probably be that education systems are destructive of the kind of learning Mr Antolini has in mind. Also, I remember being told to push on through and endure the arbitrary unpleasantnesses of school because one day I would reach an academic elysium which would feel like home - whereas my experience of Oxford was every bit as troubling and unhomely, if for different reasons, as my earlier education.

James Elkins on craft as a 'state of mindfulness'

Craft suggests pottery and carpentry, and other kinds of making, but the craft ethic extends beyond the skilled use of our hands. Craft is a way of thinking, an attitude of mind, a way of relating to any set of constraining materials, a relation of materials, skill to mind in a way so a particular person becomes known for the quality found in their use of materials. Craft is both skill and mind-set, making and doing. Craft is a state of mindfulness and a way of being.

Craftsmanship as a frame of mind (mind-set, attitude) is not fixed, or given, or inevitable, but a kind of character, a learned disposition, a habit formed over time. It can be learned. An attitude can be molded, formed, shaped (in the same fashion that we work with physical materials).

James Elkins, 'Practical Moral Philosophy for Lawyers: Imagining What We Do as Craft'

This and the previous quote come from a handout that my friend Anthony McCann used for one of his workshops on Crafting Gentleness.

Carla Needleman on 'the craft of being human'

The laws of craft and the teachings of any particular real craft run parallel to the craft of being human. The craft teaches precisely through bypassing the self-indulgent speculative part of the mind that would rather think about working than work. The craft provides experience. I can learn through the order of experiences. The craft will lead me if I am able to put aside my impatience and follow.

Carla Needleman, 'The Work of Craft' (1979)

Richard Sennett on sexual narcissism

Narcissistic character disorders are the most common sources of the forms of psychic distress therapists now see. The hysterical symptoms which were the dominant complaints of Freud's erotic and repressive society have largely disappeared. This character disorder has arisen because a new kind of society encourages the growth of its psychic components and erases a sense of meaningful social encounter outside its terms, outside the boundaries of the single self, in public. We must be careful to specify the kind of distress it is, in order not to falsify the milieu it has acquired as a social form. This character disorder does not lead inevitably to psychosis, nor do people under its sway live in an acute state of crisis all the time. The withdrawal of commitment, the continual search for a definition from within of "who I am," produces pain but no cataclysmic malaise. Narcissism, in other words, does not create the conditions which might promote its own destruction.

In the realm of sexuality, narcissism withdraws physical love from any kind of commitment, personal or social. The sheer fact of commitment on a person's part seems to him or her to limit the opportunities for "enough" experience to know who he or she is and to find the "right" person to complement who he or she is. Every sexual relationship under the sway of narcissism becomes less fulfilling the longer the partners are together.

Richard Sennett, 'The Fall of Public Man' (1977)