Tag: Albert Camus

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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We are creatures of great change. Not a single atom in our bodies today was there when we were children. Every bit of us has been replaced many times over. We flake away and become new. Whatever we are now, we are not the stuff from which we were originally made. All the people we once were. All the people we had once hoped to be.

— Colum McCann, Twist: A Novel (Random House, March 25, 2025)

Notes:

  • Man can write. I’d read anything he puts on paper….
  • NY Times Book Review: “A Novel Explores the Undersea Cables That Connect the World. The crew in Colum McCann’s new book makes complex repairs deep in the ocean. Human bonds prove harder to mend.”
  • Guardian Book Review: “Colum McCann: I like having my back against the Wall”
  • 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.

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we’re small
and flawed,
but I want to be
who I am

— Ada Limon, from “The Problem with Travel” in Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015) (via Read a Little Poetry)

Notes:

  • Photo of me by Cara Denison at 6:35 am this morning at low tide. Thank you Cara. 21° F, feels like 8° F, with wind gusts up to 15 mph. January 30, 2025. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from this morning’s walk here (twilight to sunrise) and here (my duck friends)
  • 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.

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Camus’s wisdom arose from never forgetting the power of sunlight. He grew up in poverty, he often writes, in the industrial coastal town of Oran, in Algeria, but in another sense he was always rich; he and everyone around him had light and water and sunshine at their doorsteps. He was born with blessings that his friends in the gray classrooms of the Sorbonne envied. “Even my revolts,” he confesses, recalling his boyhood, “were brilliant with sunshine.” His upbringing likewise instructed him in honoring the invisible. “I lived on almost nothing,” he writes at one point, “but also in a kind of rapture.” He clings “like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.”

I look around me—the wonky room, the squeaky terrace, the wide blue grandeur in the distance—and think: No house to maintain, no phones to answer. No noise to block out, no traffic to navigate. I can bring every part of myself to every moment.

— Pico Iyer, Aflame: Learning from Silence (Riverhead Books, January 14, 2025). Written from his cell at New Camaldoli Hermitage in the Santa Lucia Mountains of Big Sur, California.

Notes:

  • Other highlights from early in the book:
    • “Success might be another word for peace and peace, at heart, for freedom from ceaseless striving.”
      “And contemplation, I come to see, does not in any case mean closing your eyes so much as opening them, to the glory of everything around you. Coming to your senses, by getting out of your head.“
    • “I’ve never wanted to be part of any group of believers. The globe is too wide, too various, to assume one knows it all.”
    • So why am I exultant to find myself in the silence of this Catholic monastery? Maybe because there’s no “I” to get in the way of the exultancy. Only the brightness of the blue above and below. That red-tailed hawk circling, the bees busy in the lavender. It’s as if a lens cap has come off and once the self is gone, the world can come flooding in, in all its wild immediacy…Such a simple revolution: Yesterday I thought myself at the center of the world. Now the world seems to sit at the center of me.
  • Review of Pico Iyer’s new book here: Pico Iyer Made His Name Traveling. Now He Explores Inner Landscapes. (NY Times, Jan 3 2025)
  • 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.

Walking. In place inaccessible to unbelief.

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5:05 am. I peek at the weather app: 27° F, feels like 15° F, wind gusts up to 32 mph.

Camus: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

Hmmmmmm, not feelin’ it.

Everyone in the house sleeps, snuggled under their comforters. Wally snores peacefully. I slide my hand onto his belly, and it moves up and down with his inhale and exhale. What joy this creature has brought, this little ball of life.

I get out of bed. Sigh. Thick wool socks. Smart Wool, long underwear. Hoodie. Snow pants. Lined Boots. Come on Arctic blast, hit me, give me your best shot.

I walk.

Not a soul in the park. No runners. No walkers. No dredgers, who are off for the long weekend. And here I am, 985 consecutive (almost) days on this daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.

Surprised, I am, at the ebbs and flows. 12 years here at this blogging thing, and it’s ebbing, a low tide that ebbs 1 day, and ebbs 2 days and ebbs 3 days, followed by a shoulder shrug. Time with Wally. Time with book. Time with Netflix. Continue reading “Walking. In place inaccessible to unbelief.” →

Lightly child, lightly.

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Yes,
we have lost track of the light,
the mornings,
the holy innocence of those who forgive themselves.

— Albert Camus, The Fall (Vintage Books, 1957)

 

Notes:

  • Art:  (via mennyfox55). Quote: Vale of Soul Making
  • Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect 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.”