I remembered the fearless, confident boy I used to be back then…I didn’t miss him. I only, sometimes, missed the high spirits that often used to seize me when I was ten. Would there ever be an event in my life that would catapult me back into that ecstatic, silly lightheartedness, even if only for a moment?
~ Benedict Wells, The End of Loneliness: A Novel (Penguin Books, January 29, 2019)
Notes:
What? What are you thinking?
Sorry, sorry, I’m just trying to think of—of things I’ve given up on.
No. I can’t think of anything.
~ Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?: A Novel
Notes: Photo: poppins-me
I shall not grow resigned.
With all my silence,
I shall protest to the very end.
There is no reason to say:
‘It had to be.’
It is my revolt which is right,
and it must follow this joy
which is like a pilgrim on earth,
follow it step by step.
— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942 Vol. 1
Notes: 1) MMM* = Monday Morning Mantra. 2) Photograph by Jordan Tiberio via eikadan 3) Quote: Et in Arcadia Ego* and Google Books
Everyone who gives up a serious childhood dream — of becoming an artist, a doctor, an engineer, an athlete — lives the rest of their life with a sense of loss, with nagging what ifs. […]
Only a very few loves can disappoint you so fundamentally that you feel you’ve lost yourself when they’re gone. Quitting music wounded me as deeply as any relationship in my life. It was my first great loss, this innocent, awkward failure to live with what I heard and felt. For more than ten years I avoided music. It hurt too much. My anger went as deep as my love had gone. I suppose this is natural. In the aftermath of something so painful, we subsist on bitterness, which sustains us against even greater loss.
~ Glenn Kurtz in Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music
Photo: By Majewska via banishedagain
Live & Learn 