Category Archives: Literature

How can you tell a passage is by Shakespeare, Hamilton or Madison?

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1. Apparently the best way to distinguish between a text by Hamilton and one by Madison is the use of filler words like “on” or “upon” – words that appeared independent of the content. The latter appears in 1 per 1000 words in Madison but 6 per 1000 in Hamilton. This discovery was made by Frederick Mosteller, the founder of Harvard’s Statistics Department.

2. By contrast the cleverest tool used to authenticate a Shakespeare text is to count the number of words in the text that appear no where else in the Shakespeare canon. The more such words, paradoxically, the better evidence that the text is genuine.
Shakespeare’s 884,640 words included 31,534 distinct words with many occurring three or fewer times. Source: Michael Starbird, Meaning from Data.

3. Have you ever been struck by an author’s obsession with a word that appears an inordinate number of times? The most memorable instance for me was the use of “mild” by Herman Melville in Moby Dick. I wrote a paper about in graduate school. “It’s a mild, mild wind and a mild-looking sky. It’s on such
a day I struck my first whale…”

YOUR TURN: What’s the neatest trick of textual analysis you ever learned in a literature course?

“The Common Place Book – Time for a Renaissance!

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THE COMMON PLACE BOOK: an indispensable skill once central to a liberal arts education, now lost
1.) From 1600 to 2000 “commonplacing” was an essential skill taught at universities from Oxford to Harvard..
2.) “Commonplacing” could be called the art of “noise filtration.”
3.) Common place books are essentially scrapbooks of the stuff
most worth remembering from every area of life from quotes to recipes.
3.)  Milton, Bacon, Linnaeus, Jefferson practiced it.
4.) Locke, the great philosopher wrote a book about how to do it properly.
5.) He recommended organizing entries by theme (eg. “love,” or “politics”) as well as indexing.
6.) The practice was abandoned at the beginning of the 20th century.
7.) But given the explosion of information and disinformation never was this art more needed.
8.) Time for a Renaissance of this now ancient, lost art.
GENERAL PRINCIPLES BEHIND “COMMONPLACING” (aka keeping a What Matters Book/Journal)
1.)Continuity is key to depth of thought.
2.) Repetition is key to mastery,
3.) Can’t learn from the past if you can’t remember it.
4.) Just about anything worth saying has already been said.
5.) Memorize the most beautiful formulations of the most important ideas
ever thought and feelings ever felt.
6.) They will bring you and others joy
forever.
YOUR TURN: Do you journal? Would you consider “commonplacing”?

“Ichi go ichie e” – a Japanese expression meaning every meeting is a once in a lifetime opportunity (and how to use it)

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TEA, BUDDHISM, PROFESSOR KURIYAMA
1.) The expression has its origins in the Japanese tea ceremony and the Buddhist idea of the evanescence of life.
2.) I learned it from a Harvard senior, Camille Jania, when I asked her what was the most memorable idea from any course she ever took at Harvard.
3.) Ichi go Ichie was the parting message of Professor Kuriyama in his final lecture in a course on Asian medicine.
This idea reminds me of these lines from the Analects of Confucius:
“Walking with three people, I find my teacher among them. I choose what is good in them and follow it and that which is bad in them and change it.”
YOUR TURN:when you read, find the main idea; if you ever speak about

anything, make sure you accent the most important idea.

The Greatest Paragraph of All Time

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“Art is long. But life is short.  The opportunity fleeting. Experience delusive.
Judgment therefore difficult.The physician must not only do the right
thing himself, but make sure the patient, the attendants, and the externals
cooperate.”
—Hippocrates, 480-360 BC
Comment: no other paragraph I have ever found is so concise in its expression,
so tight in its logical sequence, so universally applicable, so painfully true.
Think law, parenting, teaching, sports….
YOUR TURN: What is your favorite paragraph? What is your candidate for greatest
paragraph of all time?

A Poem Every College Graduate Should Know

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IF – Rudyard Kipling
If you can keep your head when all about you
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
 If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
  If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
Comment: over the last 40 years this is the only poem I have seen circulated in the workplace. It is the only one I have included in a public presentation – a speech on the
meaning of financial risk (the point being that the unquantifiable risk of character is more important than quantifiable risk like Sharpe ratios). An excerpt from this poem is to be found above the entrance to the center court at Wimbledon. An Indian writer has called this poem “the essence of the Gita in English.” It was included by the Boston Red Sox
in a tribute video to David Ortiz.
YOUR TURN: What poem or poems have meant the most to you over your life?

Best paragraph written in human history?

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My choice is the first aphorism of Hippocrates:

Art is long but life is short, the opportunity fleeting, experience delusive, therefore judgment difficult. The physician must not only do the right thing himself but make sure the patient, the attendants, and the externals cooperate.

This aphorism applies to every sphere of life and every profession.

What is your choice?