Jessica Francis Kane, writing in The Atlantic, talks about a Marcus Aurelius quotation that she took to heart:

Book 8, #36

Do not disturb yourself by picturing your life as a whole; do not assemble in your mind the many and varied troubles which have come to you in the past and will come again in the future, but ask yourself with regard to every present difficulty: 'What is there in this that is unbearable and beyond endurance?' You would be ashamed to confess it! And then remind yourself that it is not the future or what has passed that afflicts you, but always the present, and the power of this is much diminished if you take it in isolation and call your mind to task if it thinks that it cannot stand up to it when taken on its own.

She reflects:

I thought about how Marcus Aurelius's concerns and mine differed, but I
was inspired by the idea that the spirit of them, separated by so many
centuries, was similar. His words helped me get to the desk, and stay
there, during all the years it took me to write my first good story.
Writing is hard, but is it unbearable? Who would say that it is? Even
asking the question, I'm reminded of the one exclamation in the passage:
"You would be ashamed to confess it!" His words helped me navigate
rejection, which is certainly no fun, but if you ask yourself if it's
unbearable, you find yourself preparing the next self-addressed stamped
envelope pretty quickly. The words helped me survive the protracted sale
of my first novel, and they reminded me to start writing again after a
long hiatus after the birth of my first child. I wasn't sure how to make
room for writing with a baby. It is difficult, but beyond endurance? I
got myself back to the desk.

Personally, I think nothing prepared me for writing as well as studying the Victorians. Not because they invented the world as we know it (in many ways they did), or because their work was awesome (though it was), but rather because they got so much done. Tomes, multivolume histories, three-decker novels. Theories, scientific discoveries, expeditions, surveys. Buildings, massive urban redesigns, vast public buildings, and more than a few dark Satanic mills. New ways of seeing the world, of traveling it, or recording it.

And they still managed to take month-long vacations, or at least have high tea. The older I get, the more impressive that part is- and, I begin to suspect, the more important it is for understanding why they were able to get so much done. It wasn't just the absence of television or Facebook. My intuition now senses that they were productive because they had a better sense of when to quit for the day. They could be more productive because they were more measured.

Granted, I have absolutely no real evidence for this, and I'm sure it'll be years before I can really chase it down, but their lives were about as well-documented as you can get without FitBit and SenseCam, so I'll bet you really could study their work habits, how much time they spent at work and play, how they saw the differences between the two, and how it made them great.

Yesterday I found out that one of my mentors from college and graduate school, Henrika Kuklick, died.

Riki was one of the professors who got me hooked on the history of science, and along with Rob Kohler helped make me who I am. In the fall of my freshman year I had taken a seminar with Tom Hughes, mainly because it sounded interesting and he had a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and then in the spring had a class with Hughes and Rob, who would go on to be my undergraduate and graduate advisor. In my sophomore year I took Riki’s sociology of science class, and from then on hardly a semester went by when I wasn’t taking something with her.

Riki was a kind of intellectual performer I’d never encountered before. I never knew anyone who could keep track of so many thoughts: I marveled at how she could start a sentence, divert herself, then go off on something else, but then work her way back up and finish the sentence 20 minutes later. She had a kind of unreserved enthusiasm for life and ideas that really resonated with me; my decision to work on Victorian science was influenced in no small part by her description of living in England and working in the archives there. When I was a bit older and had more of a critical sensibility, I found her scholarship to be really outstanding, erudite without being purposely complicated: I taught her Great Zimbabwe Ruins article in several of my classes, and it always went over well.

She was also a great person and teacher, always supportive and generous, great at helping you think through arguments. Not the closest reader, though; lots of chapters came back with “Good work” scrawled at the end, and little more. (That’s why you needed Rob Kohler on your committee. That man could line edit a diffraction grating.)

There are lots of people who can hardly remember classes from college, or the professors they had. Riki, in contrast, introduced to me a set of questions about the ways people, ideas, and technologies interact that I’m still dealing with. It’s why I dedicated my first book to her and Rob. And I think I’ll spend the rest of my life working on things that we talked about. Fortunately they’re very big questions.

I find as I close in on 50, I don’t particularly notice my age: I’ve had some grey hair since I was in graduate school (it’ll do that to you), and aside from bifocals, I’m not in worse physical shape (though that’s not the highest bar ever set), and more important, I’m a better writer and thinker than I’ve ever been in my life. But what I can’t comprehend is other people getting older, too: my parents are in their 70s, which I find weird, and Riki was 70, which to me is inconceivable: my memory of her was fixed in the 1980s.

It’s one of life’s ironies that the gap a person leaves when they’re gone is as large as the impact they made when they were alive. By that standard, Riki’s passing leaves a very large gap indeed.