John Gray: recommendation

Transcript context

…Yes. That you work hard is not really unusual. Obviously, it matters. I do not know how unusual it used to be, but I used to like having a cat nearby. I don’t anymore because I like traveling. I haven’t been able to do much recently because of the pandemic and other things, and I think, if you have a cat or another animal companion, leaving them for long periods is not a good idea. I’ve read actually of a lot of writers who’ve . . . I think of myself primarily now as a writer, not as a philosopher. Philosophers are professors. I’m not a professor anymore. As a writer, the mixture of calm, companionship, and complete indifference [laughs] that a cat has for you and your work and your thoughts is very calming. I do not know if it’s unusual, but I certainly found that helped my work. Nowadays, I sometimes play music, or I intersperse it — my work, if I’m working on my computer — with looking at maybe a few moments, 10 or 15 minutes of a film I’ve watched before. There may be some passage in the film that I find particularly beautiful or thrilling. I use that, too. I daresay that would be called slacking, but I don’t think of it as slacking. I think of it as recharging the mental batteries to go on to work. Last question. What will you do next?…

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