David Kanigan
…Days too small to fill their slots,
days too large for the day to hold them.
And days, no matter what their size,
that leaked into the next.
A leaky day is a dangerous thing…
– Richard Siken, from The Field of Rooms and Halls
Notes:
To whom does my brain belong?
With what can I or you resist?
Within me disorder
While my brain seeks its order, at almost any price …
~ Göran Sonnevi, from Mozart’s Third Brain
Notes:
It is perfectly possible — indeed, it is far from uncommon — to go to bed one night, or wake up one morning, or simply walk through a door one has known all one’s life, and discover, between inhaling and exhaling, that the self one has sewn together with such effort is all dirty rags, is unusable, is gone: and out of what raw material will one build a self again? The lives of men — and, therefore, of nations — to an extent literally unimaginable, depend on how vividly this question lives in the mind. It is a question which can paralyze the mind, of course.
~ James Baldwin from “Nothing Personal,” in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction
Notes:
How strong they could want something and how dissatisfied they were with having.
Why was having never enough?
And why did wanting always feel so real?
~ Catherine Lacey, from “The Answers: A Novel” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 6, 2017)
Notes:
I don’t know. Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven: A Novel
Notes:
I was interrupted. People – People. – Phone. – Phone. – Endless. And I am so tired. – :And I would like to sleep under trees – Red ones – Blue ones – Swirling passionate ones – It has been a broken up day – … All fine – but I so damnably tired – I…found I had failed –
~ Alfred Stieglitz · [New York City] · June 30, 1917, from My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz
Notes:
Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night.
Notes:
I just keep taking the next step knowing there’s no call for standing in the crowd and recounting my failures, there’s no retribution that demands I shrug off the notice of the works of my hands. There’s no need to deny or lessen the good by stepping back into my wanderings to tell of the bad. There’s grace in the ordinary life I live that just needs to live, knowing it’s all miracle, all of this beautiful stuff every morning. All the days long.
~ Lisa Tindal, from “The Essence of Days”
(By one of our very own WordPress bloggers at the handle: Quiet Confidence)
Notes:
It’s worth mentioning that this is my edit. Of the roughly eight million words handwritten or typed into my diary since September 5, 1977, I’m including only a small fraction. An entirely different book from the same source material could make me appear nothing but evil, selfish, generous, or even, dare I say, sensitive. On any given day I am all these things and more: stupid, cheerful, misanthropic, cruel, narrow-minded, open, petty—the list goes on and on…It wasn’t easy revisiting what are now 156 volumes of my diary.
I broke the job up—a month or two per day—but after reading about me, I’d have to spend the rest of the day being me. I don’t know that I’ve ever done anything quite so exhausting.
~ David Sedaris, in his Introduction to his new book “Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002)” (Little, Brown and Company, May 30, 2017)
Notes:
