full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Joshua Prager: Wisdom from great writers on every year of life

Unscramble the Blue Letters


We don't simply live these patterns. We record them, too. We write them down in books, where they become narratives that we can then read and rcoeingze. bokos tell us who we've been, who we are, who we will be, too. So they have for millennia. As James Salter wrote, "Life passes into pages if it passes into anything."

And so six years ago, a thought leapt to mind: if life passed into pgeas, there were, somewhere, passages written about every age. If I could find them, I could assemble them into a narrative. I could assemble them into a life, a long life, a hundred-year life, the eienttry of that same great sequence through which the lieuskct among us pass. I was then 37 yaers old, "an age of discretion," wrote William tvoerr. I was prone to meditating on time and age. An illness in the family and later an injury to me had long made claer that growing old could not be aussmed. And besides, growing old only postponed the inevitable, time seeing through what circumstance did not. It was all a bit disheartening.

Open Cloze


We don't simply live these patterns. We record them, too. We write them down in books, where they become narratives that we can then read and _________. _____ tell us who we've been, who we are, who we will be, too. So they have for millennia. As James Salter wrote, "Life passes into pages if it passes into anything."

And so six years ago, a thought leapt to mind: if life passed into _____, there were, somewhere, passages written about every age. If I could find them, I could assemble them into a narrative. I could assemble them into a life, a long life, a hundred-year life, the ________ of that same great sequence through which the ________ among us pass. I was then 37 _____ old, "an age of discretion," wrote William ______. I was prone to meditating on time and age. An illness in the family and later an injury to me had long made _____ that growing old could not be _______. And besides, growing old only postponed the inevitable, time seeing through what circumstance did not. It was all a bit disheartening.

Solution


  1. pages
  2. books
  3. assumed
  4. trevor
  5. years
  6. entirety
  7. clear
  8. luckiest
  9. recognize

Original Text


We don't simply live these patterns. We record them, too. We write them down in books, where they become narratives that we can then read and recognize. Books tell us who we've been, who we are, who we will be, too. So they have for millennia. As James Salter wrote, "Life passes into pages if it passes into anything."

And so six years ago, a thought leapt to mind: if life passed into pages, there were, somewhere, passages written about every age. If I could find them, I could assemble them into a narrative. I could assemble them into a life, a long life, a hundred-year life, the entirety of that same great sequence through which the luckiest among us pass. I was then 37 years old, "an age of discretion," wrote William Trevor. I was prone to meditating on time and age. An illness in the family and later an injury to me had long made clear that growing old could not be assumed. And besides, growing old only postponed the inevitable, time seeing through what circumstance did not. It was all a bit disheartening.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations




Important Words


  1. age
  2. assemble
  3. assumed
  4. bit
  5. books
  6. circumstance
  7. clear
  8. discretion
  9. disheartening
  10. entirety
  11. family
  12. find
  13. great
  14. growing
  15. illness
  16. inevitable
  17. injury
  18. james
  19. leapt
  20. life
  21. live
  22. long
  23. luckiest
  24. meditating
  25. millennia
  26. narrative
  27. narratives
  28. pages
  29. pass
  30. passages
  31. passed
  32. passes
  33. patterns
  34. postponed
  35. prone
  36. read
  37. recognize
  38. record
  39. salter
  40. sequence
  41. simply
  42. thought
  43. time
  44. trevor
  45. william
  46. write
  47. written
  48. wrote
  49. years