Category: Quotes

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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John Berger could have written a book called ‘Ways of Listening’. He listened with his whole body. As though my words were rain, and he was the earth. He absorbed everything, gathered every drop, missed absolutely nothing. His listening eyes were lakes in the high mountains. It was love, there’s no other word for it. I don’t think that stillness, that quality of attention, is even possible in digital-age humans, who suckle on mobile phones from the moment they’re born. It’s a generational thing. Lost forever, I believe.

– Arundhati Roy, “Mother Mary Comes to Me” (Scribner, September 2, 2025)

Notes:

  • John Berger portrait from Verso Books, October 2015.
  • Book Review NY Times: “She Raged. She Terrified. And She Shape Arundhati Roy. The prizewinning novelist’s unsparing memoir, “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” captures the eventful life and times of her mother, a driven educator and imperfect inspiration.”
  • 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.

5:00 PM Bell!

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From here she could see a whole teeming mass…running about the city like ants, all dedicated to the same pointless task. She stepped back. It felt good to escape above, free of the noise… “It’s lovely here,” she said.”

Go now. Find your peace… Let your mind wander. Skim like a dragonfly over the pool of your consciousness and let go… you can quiet your mind.

— R.F. Kuang, Katabasis: A Novel (William Morrow, August 26, 2025)

Notes:

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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Gently he grasped the copper handle of the door – the warmth of the mountains, woods, rivers and valleys, would discover the hidden depths of human existence, would finally understand that the unbreakable ties that bound him to the world were not imprisoning chains and condemnation but a kind of clinging to an indestructible sense that he had a home; and he would discover the enormous joys of mutuality which embraced and animated everything: rain, wind, sun and snow, the flight of a bird, the taste of fruit, the scent of grass; and he would suspect that his anxieties and bitterness were merely cumbersome ballast required by the live roots of his past and the rising airship of his certain future, and, then – he started opening the door – he would finally know that our every moment is passed in a procession across dawns and day’s-ends of the orbiting earth, across successive waves of winter and summer, threading the planets and the stars. Suitcase in hand, he stepped into the room and stood there blinking in the half-light.

― László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance. Translated by George Szirtes. (New Directions Publishing, June 2002) (via Alive on All Channels)

Notes:

  • DK Photo @ 6:20 am yesterday morning @ Cove Island Park. More photos from yesterday’s walk here.
  • Quote: Thank you Beth via Alive on All Channels
  • 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.

but then you shake yourself off and keep moving

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These days, all I talk about and think about is the cognitive dissonance required to move through the world. Increasingly, I struggle to disentangle my many selves, to get on with the day. All my selves weep often. I try to have grace. I tell my friends that I’m no longer sure how anyone just drifts through the days, the months, without acknowledging the horrors. I imagine what it must be like to be able to turn off the parts of the world that unsettle you. It must feel like existing in an animated universe that adheres to cartoon physics: you fall from an inconceivable height and, landing, a cloud of dust billows up from the ground, but then you shake yourself off and keep moving.

— Hanif Abdurraqib, from Zohran Mamdani and Mahmoud Khalil are in on the Joke (The New Yorker, July 13, 2025

Notes:

  1. Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels)
  2. Portrait of Hanif Abdurraqub via Canisius College

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn32 Comments

“And the part about light as a living creature,” he said. “What a beautiful thought. I hadn’t really heard that idea before…It really got me for a second,” he said. “I had to think about it. Is light alive? I mean, it doesn’t excrete anything. It doesn’t reproduce. And yet it gives life, so it must have some kind of life to give…” He’d isolated the ultimate kernel…the very idea that I’d fallen in love with, the idea of light as a kind of amniotic fluid flooding the cosmos.

— Jon Raymond, God and Sex: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, August 5, 2025)

Notes:

  • DK Photo @ 5:23 am this morning. Nobadeer Beach. 57° F. Nantucket, MA. More photos from this morning’s glorious walk here.
  • 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.