Institutional structure Quotes

“[Shakespeare realized that] Women are able to understand themselves better on a personal level and survive in the world if they dress in men's clothing, thus living underground, safe (...). The presence of women disguising themselves as men dictates that the play be a comedy; women remaining in their frocks, a tragedy. In four great tragedies -Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear- almost all the women die (...). How much the women have to adhere to the rules and regulations of their enviroment makes a large difference. Once Rosalind [disguised as a man in As You Like It] has run away from the court, she has no institutional structures to deal with. Ophelia [in her frocks] is surrounded tightly by institutional structures of family, court, and politics; only by going mad can be get out of it all.”

“Central to Möser's view of the human world was "honor," a notion that was as important to corporatist society as the notion of dignity would be for the more individualistic society that succeeded it. In Möser's view, a person acquired his identity from his place in the institutional structure of society, a society in which economic, social, and political institutions were not distinguished from one another. His status (as a guildsman, noble landowner, serf, or independent peasant cottager) determined not only how he earned his living, but his sense of who he was, of what his duties and obligations were, of those to whom he ought to defer and those who ought to defer to him. (In the language of modern sociology, Möser's society was one in which almost all of the individual's roles derived from a single status.) Who one was was largely a continuation of what one's forebears had been. For Möser the real self was the socially encumbered self, the self based on status, on historical and regional particularity, and on property. It was a self whose prime virtue was honor. Status and the honor that attached to it were inherited, although they could be lost if one failed to live up to the duties of one's rank.”

“If there’s a single idea I emphasize when people ask about writing, it’s that there’s no right way to produce a book. But I do think that whatever you do, you should do regularly, whether it’s waking up at midnight and drinking vodka or waking up at dawn and drinking tea, whether it’s sitting in a monkish study or writing on the back of a flatbed truck. The analogy I like is children’s literature: in a lot of children’s books, there’s a huge institutional structure (Hogwarts, for example) whose presiding safety allows the children’s imagination to run free. The more consistent your habits are – and this ties into having your tools nailed down – the more secure your brain will be to run free and create.”