Jack

“I want to tell her that she's luminous, she's so bright in my mind, sometimes I can't focus.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love on the Brain

“So I went to Case, and the Dean of Case says to us, says, it’s a all men’s school, says, “Men, look at, look to the person on your left, and the person on your right. One of you isn’t going to be here next year; one of you is going to fail.” So I get to Case, and again I’m studying all the time, working really hard on my classes, and so for that I had to be kind of a machine.

I, the calculus book that I had, in high school we — in high school, as I said, our math program wasn’t much, and I had never heard of calculus until I got to college. But the calculus book that we had was great, and in the back of the book there were supplementary problems that weren’t, you know, that weren’t assigned by the teacher. The teacher would assign, so this was a famous calculus text by a man named George Thomas, and I mention it especially because it was one of the first books published by Addison-Wesley, and I loved this calculus book so much that later I chose Addison-Wesley to be the publisher of my own book.

But Thomas’s Calculus would have the text, then would have problems, and our teacher would assign, say, the even numbered problems, or something like that. I would also do the odd numbered problems. In the back of Thomas’s book he had supplementary problems, the teacher didn’t assign the supplementary problems; I worked the supplementary problems. I was, you know, I was scared I wouldn’t learn calculus, so I worked hard on it, and it turned out that of course it took me longer to solve all these problems than the kids who were only working on what was assigned, at first. But after a year, I could do all of those problems in the same time as my classmates were doing the assigned problems, and after that I could just coast in mathematics, because I’d learned how to solve problems. So it was good that I was scared, in a way that I, you know, that made me start strong, and then I could coast afterwards, rather than always climbing and being on a lower part of the learning curve.”
― Donald Knuth

“Fonny liked me so much that it didn't occur to him that he loved me. I liked him so much that no other boy was real to me. I didn't see them. I didn't know what this meant. But the waiting moment, which had spied us on the road, and which was waiting for us, knew.”
― James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

“Dembe about Reddington:

More than anyone I've ever known, he's always been at peace with death. He says death is inevitable. It will come for us all. And that inevitability robs death entirely of its significance.

What matters are the things that are not inevitable.

The things we create. The things we find. The left we take when everything in our life is leading us right. How we live. I've always loved him for that. For his remarkable refusal to "go quietly into that good night."

Cooper:

The poem... by Dylan Thomas. Rage, rage Against the dying of the light

Dembe:

Yes.

Imagine. Raymond, a man surrounded by death in so many ways, so passionately committed to embracing life. He could have surrendered a thousand times over and Some End. But instead, he chooses to rage.

To rage against the dying of the light.

To rage against the bad guys that would do us all harm.

Rage to protect those people he loves.

To find moments of peace and joy... and fun...

( laughs )

...even though he knows the light is still dying.

To live a most passionate life, knowing it will still lead to the same inevitable end... is perhaps the most deeply moving choice one can make.

It is the lesson at the very core of my time with him. You never imagined this is how it would end.

But our time with him, our time together, was never about how it ended. It was about the adventure, about life, about Raymond constantly reminding us, showing us, imploring us... to rage.

To rage.”
― Dembe Zuma