There was a full moon outside and it was the only peaceful thing they had seen all day.
It shone with an impassive beauty, like a cold gem against dark velvet, not at all interested in the human pain down below.
— Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees: A Novel (Bloomsbury Publishing; 1st edition (November 2, 2021)
Photos: DK’s Moon shots @ 5:45 pm today from backyard.
Some gulls soared in the air above me.
They seemed almost to be enjoying the warmth and stillness.
A stillness so seldom here.
— Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Morning Star: A Novel. (Penguin Press, September 28, 2021)
Photo: DK @ Daybreak. 6:57 am, October 19, 2021. 45° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT
What amazed her was their persistent insistence on boosting the self when the world—and this country, in particular—was in disgraceful shambles. The progressing, ever-widening gulf of disparity in every sphere. And were we not also on the verge of an environmental apocalypse? People seemed more fixated than ever on notions of “self-tend, self-care, self.” In the current context, wasn’t naked pursuit of health obscene? The self-contemplation down to the microbiomic makeup of your alimentary system, yet such contemplation was divorced from any reflection. This seemed, now more than ever, the most American of myopias, this unapologetic—boastful, even—attention to the surface self. It sort of made sense, though. A retreat to the local. The hyperlocal and controllable: your heart, your lungs, your flesh.
— Dana Spiotta, Wayward: A Novel (Knopf, July 6, 2021)
Notes:
From the moment Ally was born, pushed out of Sam’s body (nothing could be more common than motherhood and yet nothing about it could ever be banal), Ally became Sam’s sun, Sam’s primary concern. She felt a directedness and a purpose and a meaning she had never experienced before. Another way of putting it: it was the least fake feeling she had ever had, the most earnest. Did all mothers feel this way? Did fathers feel this way? No, yes, doesn’t matter. On some level, it was Ally and then there was every other human on the earth. At first it was physical. The need to hold and feed and comfort. That was the best part of being a mother, answering that need. It was so simple and complete. Sure, there were times Sam longed for sleep, times she felt positively enslaved, but all it took was the head on her chest, the hand clutching at her, Sam’s own hand supporting the plump, perfect back. Touching her was like taking a drug. The back, the foot, the leg, the little arm; the lips, the ears, the toes, the perfect tiny nose. The thighs, the dimpled knees, the lines of fat at the wrists, the tapered, padded fingers with the tiny oval of a nail. Look at her. The eyes, well, they were the same always, the same today. Large, heavy lidded, dark brown, wide-set, extravagantly lashed. What a beauty she was and is. Even at the height of her adolescent awkwardness, Sam had found her profoundly, significantly beautiful. Was it “true”? Did others see her the way Sam did? It didn’t matter. What mattered was that Sam had felt this abiding love for sixteen years, and it was the best thing she had ever felt or would ever feel.
— Dana Spiotta, Wayward: A Novel (Knopf, July 6, 2021)
Notes:
4:00 a.m. I flip open phone. Check Dark Sky app. 72° F. Tropical Storm Elsa. Heavy Rain. Flood Warnings.
Right. How bad can it possibly be? Nothing this Canadian with years @ Northern Michigan hasn’t seen. Please. Yet another over reaction, media click bait.
Cove Island Park walk. 430 consecutive mornings. Like in a row.
Rain jacket. Pants. Socks. Shoes. There was a time, in July, when you’d walk out, t-shirt, shorts, sock-less, maybe a baseball cap — and absorb whatever would hit you. Today, not so much. Hemingway: “No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.” He nailed it.
I lug the backpack to the car. The camera. Fanny pack, with keys, smartphone, earbuds.
I drive.
Radio News recaps yesterday’s headlines:
OMG. Off with the radio.
The newspaper delivery man flips the morning paper on the driveway. It skids in the rain.
Stamford Sanitation. His orange florescent bib reflects my headlights. My back twinges watching him empty the can. God Bless you Man.
And not another soul dares to join me in this downpour. The question is why YOU are out here.
I jump out of the car to take a few shots on Weed Avenue, on the way to the park. The rain jacket can’t keep it out. My shoes sink in puddles. Socks are sopping wet. Long-sleeved shirt and t-shirt are wet to the skin. I get back to the car to find I left the door open, rain puddles on seat. Oh, what a beautiful day, you Idiot!
I drive.
I turn the corner to pull into Cove Island Park.
After 430 consecutive mornings, like in a row, you notice what’s out of place.
Sesame Street: “One of these things is not like the others. One of these things doesn’t belong. Can you tell which of these things is not like the others before I finish this song?”
If we are separated I will
try to wait for you
on your side of things
your side of the wall and the water
and of the light moving at its own speed
even on leaves that we have seen
I will wait on one side
while a side is there
— W.S. Merwin, “Travelling Together” from The Rain in the Trees
Notes:
When I was younger I thought my knowledge would increase with years, that it was steadily expanding like the universe. A constantly widening area of certainty that correspondingly displaced and diminished the reach of uncertainty. I was really very optimistic. With the passage of time I must admit that I know roughly as much as then, perhaps even slightly less, and with nothing like the same certainty. My so-called experiences are not the same as knowledge. It is more like, how shall I put it, a kind of echo chamber in which the little I know rings hollow and inadequate. A growing void around a scant knowledge that rattles foolishly like the dried-up kernel in a walnut. My experiences are experiences of ignorance, its boundlessness, and I will never discover how much I still don’t know, and how much is something I believed.
— Jens Christian Grøndahl, Silence in October.
Notes:Quote: Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels). Portrait of Jens Christian Grondahl via Nuevo Periodico
it’s terribly important that I understand this.
Because, you see, sir,
students rush from one class to the other,
because the period is short,
run from mathematics to geography,
from geography to history,
chemistry, biology – you follow? – run, run.
And if I was one of the professors, teachers, I would say,
Look, sit down.
Be quiet for five minutes.
Be quiet.
Look out of the window, if you want to.
See the beauty of light on the water,
or the leaf, and look at this and that, but be quiet’.
— J. Krishnamurti, from Dialogue 16 with Allan W. Anderson in San Diego, 27 February 1974
Notes:
There is nothing more liberating than to realize you don’t have to live up to anything anymore.
— Betty Broderick, Dirty John (Netflix, S2:E6, The Twelfth of Never)
Photo: Esquire
“I am always on the edge of what I am doing. I do everything badly, sloppily, to get it over with so that I can get on to the next thing that I will do badly and sloppily so that I can then do nothing – which I do anxiously, distractedly, wondering all the time if there isn’t something else I should be getting on with. … When I’m working, I’m wishing I was doing nothing and when I’m doing nothing I’m wondering if I should be working. I hurry through what I’ve got to do and then, when I’ve got nothing to do, I keep glancing at the clock, wishing it was time to go out. Then, when I’m out, I’m wondering how long it will be before I’m back home.”
— Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence
Inspired by: I picked up the book after reading “Vivian Gornick: ‘I Couldn’t Finish Michelle Obama’s Becoming‘: (The Guardian, March 26, 2021): “The last book that made me laugh Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer is a brilliant book. For me, the best thing he ever wrote. A little bit of genius, it made me laugh, and laugh, and laugh.”
“Okay!” said Dorothy out loud, stressing the exclamation. She retrieved the toolbox from under the kitchen sink and located nails and hammer. A change would do her good. She hung the mirror on the wall, horizontal-wise. She stepped back and noted with satisfaction that she could no longer see below her neck.
— Christine Smallwood, The LIfe of the Mind (Hogarth, March 2, 2021)
Notes:
She felt along the solid green marble of the day for the hairline crack that might let her out. This could not be forced. Outside, the air hung swagged and the clouds sat in piles of couch stuffing, and in the south of the sky there was a tender spot, where a rainbow wanted to happen.
Then three sips of coffee, and a window opened.
— Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This: A Novel (Riverhead Books, February 16, 2021)
Portrait via Esquire: “In the Face of Tragedy, Patricia Lockwood Found the Real World Again. In her first novel, No One Is Talking About This, the poet laureate of Twitter engulfs readers in “internet poisoning”—and memorializes someone she loved and lost.” Lockwood is the author of the acclaimed 2017 memoir, Priestdaddy.
Notes:
Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this.” Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions–trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there….
— Virginia Woolf, from “Modern Fiction” in The Common Reader 1925)
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Acceptance, when it comes arrives in waves; listen with your chest. You will feel a pendulum swing within you, favoring one direction or another. And that is your answer. The answer is always inside your chest. The right choice weighs more. That’s how you know. It causes you to lean in its direction.
~ Augusten Burroughs, You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas
Quote (via Make Believe Boutique)
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Live & Learn 