Category: Books

Miracle. All of it.

Live & Learn17 Comments

There are a finite number of times we get to do anything and after the first time it’s a count. We only get to look at the sky so many times in a life. There are a finite number of rainstorms and seasons that we’ll witness, and the number seems so big until it doesn’t. We never know when will be the last time we taste something or see someone or do anything at all. And for all the money in the world, time is not for sale no matter what the doctors say when we beg for more of it toward the end, finally seeing that we forgot to count the raindrops.

— Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within (Random House, July 9, 2024)

Notes:

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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These contrasts of inside and outside, and lightness and darkness, create little thresholds we pass through from hour to hour. These simple transitions, such as walking through a trellis, or sitting down for breakfast, can change your whole mood. A room is a mood, and we need different moods, small and capacious. The past is more past when it happened somewhere else, with other qualities of light. The changes are needed—they make time more felt…

Le Corbusier defined the function of a house as “1. A shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves and the inquisitive. 2. A receptacle for light and sun. 3. A certain number of cells appropriated to cooking, work, and personal life.” Everything else is merely decorative, this suggests.

— Elisa Gabbert, Any Person is the Only Self: Essays (FSG Originals, June 11, 2024)

Notes:

  1. Book Reviews of “Any Person is the Only Self”
  2. Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn17 Comments

But I also knew that the most intimate relationship is not mutual. It is one-way: the mother’s relationship to the child. The best part of my life had been this animal intimacy, the secretion of my milk into this body, the teaching how to lift food to the mouth, how to speak, how to show love according to the feeling of love, how to put on a shoe, how to pick up a spoon, how to wipe one’s own tears, how to piss and shit and be clean. Nothing, nothing in the world like that. That absolute authority of which the baby must be convinced in order to feel safe, separate from the mother’s body. The honor the mother must give the baby, when the baby is ready to know that her absolute authority was never real. The careful timing of the revelation that, baby, you are alone, as alone as anything can be. How lucky you were, baby, to have been a baby with its mother. Now you are ready to start living life in the imagination, to start imagining your way back to every good feeling you don’t quite remember from the days of milk.

— Sarah Manguso, Liars: A Novel (Hogarth, July 23, 2024)

Notes:

  1. Book Reviews of “Liars”
  2. Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn10 Comments

Anger is a cousin of intelligence. If you are not revolted by certain things, you have no boundaries. If you have no boundaries, you have no self-knowledge. If you have no self-knowledge, you have no taste, and if you have no taste, why are you here?

― Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People (MCD, February 27, 2024)

Notes:

  1. Book Review: A Dazzling Humorist Returns With a Deep Dive Into Loss. NY Times, Feb 24, 2024.
  2. Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Life needs volunteers

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This is all my fault for not moving homes or cities, for not taking certain jobs or marrying certain men, for looking backward all the time when I should be looking forward. I dwell too much. I hold on to things I shouldn’t, to people I shouldn’t. If you don’t change, change will find you in its most unruly form. It will press down on your vulnerabilities until they squish out the edges. Life needs volunteers or else it will start calling on people at random.

― Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People (MCD, February 27, 2024)

Book Review: A Dazzling Humorist Returns With a Deep Dive Into Loss. NY Times, Feb 24, 2024.