We See from the Periphery, Not the Center: Reflections on Literature in an Age of Crisis, Alfred Kazin:
"How in 1977 can any great book help me to live better, I who am a creature of anxiety, involved against my will in all twentieth-century injustices and cruelties? How can Kafka relieve me of guilt, he who knew as a Jew even before the Nazis murdered his sisters, since powerlessness is a crime that invites exploitation, that "not the murderer but the victim is considered guilty"? How can Proust, who died to the world in order to live again through his great book retracing the past-how can he relieve me of my dread of death, when I can no longer accept the next world, the world of imagination, promised to me by his last-minute discovery of art in the volume Time Recaptured? But these are rhetorical questions whose emptiness I do not wish to conceal.
Because no book has enabled anyone to live better. The influence of any book on my consciousness is necessarily intermittent, a flash, a hope, an illusion, a picture. No more than any other external agent can a book effect a transformation that lasts.
What a great literary work does do for me is to clear my mind, to rearrange the order of my thinking, to show me, in the immortal words of Porgy and Bess, that "it ain't necessarily so." The real power of a literary work consists in presenting us with alternatives. If the work is emotionally effective enough, it can be an antidote to our usual mental confinement. It is the vision of another mind, another way of thinking, not a lasting way out."
"I’m somewhere down towards the episodic end of this spectrum. I have no sense of my life as a narrative with form, and very little interest in my own past. My personal memory is very poor, and rarely impinges on my present consciousness. I make plans for the future, and to that extent think of myself perfectly adequately as something with long-term continuity. But I experience this way of thinking of myself as remote and theoretical, given the most central or fundamental way in which I think of myself, which is as a mental self or someone. Using ME to express the way in which I think of myself, I can accurately express my experience by saying that I do not think of ME as being something in the future."
"I have to think that “Against Rereading,” by Oscar Schwartz, is a massive troll, because the alternative — that Schwartz believes himself to be so omnicompetent a reader, so perfect in his perception, so masterful in his judgment, that he absorbs all that even the greatest book has to offer with a single reading — is unpleasant to contemplate. Or maybe there’s one more possibility: that — like Kafka’s hunger artist, who never found a food he liked — Schwartz has never been sufficiently interested in a book to return to it.
But surely he makes one important point: the problem with our culture today is definitely all those people who don’t want ceaseless novelty. Definitely. I’m almost certain he’s just trolling, though."
I'll take the UV rays over a bunch of smelly, synthetic goop all over my skin. I also see people go from not seeing the sun in months to full, 1pm exposure for hours, then they get roasted, then they're in pain, then it takes weeks to heal, then they do it again. Or they'll start slathering on an absurd amount of sunscreen, the summer months go by, and they look just as sick and pasty and unhealthy as they did last year, as if they never went outside.
You've got to build intuition around how to get sun: what's your current skin tone, how much sun you've had recently, what it feels like to get an appropriate amount of sun vs. get burnt, the time of day, elevation considerations, whether you're going to be in the sun again tomorrow or all week after a lot of exposure today, if you're getting more direct sun on key areas like your neck and nose and ears, or whether you've got full body exposure. The more time in the sun, the more you understand how to behave, how to protect yourself, how to get what you need to feel good.
Most people pay no attention to how they feel day-to-day. They never learn what it feels like to eat a nutritiously dense meal, or what being fit feels like over the long term. It's the same with sun exposure: if you don't pay attention, you'll never learn.
"How in 1977 can any great book help me to live better, I who am a creature of anxiety, involved against my will in all twentieth-century injustices and cruelties? How can Kafka relieve me of guilt, he who knew as a Jew even before the Nazis murdered his sisters, since powerlessness is a crime that invites exploitation, that "not the murderer but the victim is considered guilty"? How can Proust, who died to the world in order to live again through his great book retracing the past-how can he relieve me of my dread of death, when I can no longer accept the next world, the world of imagination, promised to me by his last-minute discovery of art in the volume Time Recaptured? But these are rhetorical questions whose emptiness I do not wish to conceal.
Because no book has enabled anyone to live better. The influence of any book on my consciousness is necessarily intermittent, a flash, a hope, an illusion, a picture. No more than any other external agent can a book effect a transformation that lasts.
What a great literary work does do for me is to clear my mind, to rearrange the order of my thinking, to show me, in the immortal words of Porgy and Bess, that "it ain't necessarily so." The real power of a literary work consists in presenting us with alternatives. If the work is emotionally effective enough, it can be an antidote to our usual mental confinement. It is the vision of another mind, another way of thinking, not a lasting way out."
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40133281