Tag: Quote

Saturday Morning

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Notes:

  • Photo: DK: Daybreak. Foggy Morning. 6:11, 6:18 & 6:22 am. July 18, 2020. 72° F. Humidity 81%. Wind: 4 mph. Gusts: 8 mph. Cloud Cover: 43%. Weed Avenue, Stamford, CT
  • Inspired by: “All that’s required is to pull out our ear buds and turn off our camera phones and listen to the sounds, pleasant and troubling alike, that the universe provides, including most especially its silence.” —  Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life (W. W. Norton & Company, March 10, 2020)

Saturday Morning Walk

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Where does it start? Muscles tense. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between the earth and sky. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind. Heel touches down. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of the foot. The big toe pushes off, and the delicately balanced weight of the body shifts again. The legs reverse position. It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking. The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world, this walking that wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak.

—  Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Penguin Books (June 1, 2001)

Photo: Bjorn Breimo, Walking (Norway)

Happy July 4th

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Thank you to a great country with wonderful Americans who took me in.

A country in which people I think highly of share these common traits, as Thomas L. Friedman explained in his recent opinion essay:

“Respect science, respect nature, respect each other.”

Notes:

  • Inspired by Beth (again) in Alive on all Channels: “If they come for the innocent without stepping over your dead body, cursed be your religion and your life.” — Ciaron O’Reilly, Catholic Worker
  • Photo via Great Falls Tribune

Tuesday, January 5, 1999

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We’ve all heard of that future, and it sounds pretty lonely. In the next century, the line of thinking goes, everyone will work at home, shop at home, watch movies at home and communicate with all their friends through videophones and e- mail. It’s as if science and culture have progressed for one purpose only: to keep us from ever having to get out of our pajamas.

— Mick LaSalle, Chronicle Staff Writer in the San Francisco Chronicle, published Tuesday, January 5, 1999

Notes:

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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Sometimes now I envy those people who are at the beginning of the long road of the lives they’ll make, who still have so many decisions ahead as the road forks and forks again. Imagining their trajectories, I picture a real road, branching and branching, and I can feel it, shadowy, forested, full of the anxiety and the excitement of choosing, of starting off without quite knowing where you will end up…

I have no regrets about the roads I took, but a little nostalgia for that period when most of the route is ahead, for that stage in which you might become many things that is so much the promise of youth, now that I have chosen and chosen again and again and am far down one road and far past many others. Possibility means that you might be many things that you are not yet, and it is intoxicating when it’s not terrifying.

— Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir (Viking, March 10, 2020)