Source: Hartley Lin (formerly known by the pseudonym Ethan Rilly) is a cartoonist based in Montreal, Canada. Young Frances, the first collection from his ongoing comic book Pope Hats, won the 2019 Doug Wright Award for Best Book. He has drawn for The New Yorker, The Hollywood Reporter, Slate, Taddle Creek and HarperCollins. (via thisisn’thappiness)
“1 a.m.: Lie here then. Just lie here. What of it? It’s just lying here. Think of good things… Try to calm the banging heart.”
— Samantha Harvey, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping (Grove Press; May 12, 2020)
Notes:
(He) said that happiness is what happens when you go to bed on the hottest night of the summer, a night so hot you can’t even wear a tee-shirt and you sleep on top of the sheets instead of under them, although try to sleep is probably more accurate. And then at some point late, late, late at night, say just a bit before dawn, the heat finally breaks and the night turns into cool and when you briefly wake up, you notice that you’re almost chilly, and in your groggy, half-consciousness, you reach over and pull the sheet around you and just that flimsy sheet makes it warm enough and you drift back off into a deep sleep. And it’s that reaching, that gesture, that reflex we have to pull what’s warm – whether it’s something or someone – toward us, that feeling we get when we do that, that feeling of being sad in the world and ready for sleep, that’s happiness.
— Paul Schmidtberger, Design Flaws of the Human Condition
Notes: Quote: from liquidlightandrunningtrees via Last Tambourine. Photo: forward to forget
Silence can also be a friend. A comfort and a source of deeper riches. In The Silence That Follows, the poet Rolf Jacobsen wrote:
The silence that lives in the grass
on the underside of each blade
and in the blue space between the stones.
The silence that rests like a young bird in your palms. It is easy to see oneself in Rolf Jacobsen’s experience. Alone out on the ocean, you can hear the water; in the forest, a babbling brook or else branches swaying in the wind; on the mountain, tiny movements between stones and moss. These are times when silence is reassuring. I look for that within myself.
— Erling Kagge, Silence: In the Age of Noise
Notes: Photo by Chris Jones with Blades of Grass. Prior Erling Kagge posts here.
The silence I have in mind may be found wherever you are, if you pay attention, inside your mind, and is without cost. You don’t have to go to Sri Lanka: you can experience it in your bathtub. — I discover silence when I stay five extra minutes in bed at home.
— Erling Kagge, Silence: In the Age of Noise
Jenny Offill describes her mood…”she’s tired all the time now…she can feel how slow she is walking, as if the air itself is something to be reckoned with.” I read the passage a week ago. And Mind keeps flipping it back.
Sleep app congratulates me this morning on seven consecutive days of hitting sleep targets. Grooving a routine. And it’s working. I’m sleeping.
But, tired all the time.
Lower Manhattan this morning.
40+ F, but don’t get caught out without a coat. Frigid winds blow through the tunnels between the hulking skyscrapers.
Colleagues take the subway to a client meeting: It’s only two stops!
I let them go. I need to walk. Shoulder stiff. Neck aches. Need to be alone.
A lifetime, swift walker. But not lately. Like a glider banking energy, I’m waiting for a tail wind, or even a gust.
Not my photo above, I couldn’t muster up my own shot. I pause to watch the tourists take their shots with the Bull. In all the years, this is the first time you’ve stopped (paused) to admire him. You are a beaut Mr. Bull.
Bullfighter or the Bull? Red cape, the muleta. God Save the Bull.
Three minutes to destination.
I take a take breath and step into the building.
Game time.
Photo: Alexander Nilssen, Bull of Wall Street
One’s very own room, ventilated to please one’s self, furnished just as one wishes, with one’s pet belongings arranged to suit one’s own tastes; an entire bed in which one may pitch and toss, stretch and yawn, without the consciousness that another would-be sleeper is being annoyed – all of these are aids to happiness.
– Virginia Terhune Van de Water, “From Kitchen to Garret,” (Published in 1910)
Notes: Quote via Schonwieder. Photo via Sabon Home
I sat on my patio, wrapped in a blanket…when I noticed that my room was not on the ground floor but on the subfloor beneath, making it closer to the edge where the beach began…I turned on the radio and Nina Simone was singing I Put a Spell on You. The seals were silent, and I could hear the waves in the distance, winter on the West Coast. I sank into bed and slept heavily.
~ Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey (Alfred A. Knopf, September 24, 2019)
Photo: Dream Inn Santa Cruz, CA by Angelo DeSantis
7:05 am. Stamford station.
I’m waiting for the 2151 Acela to Baltimore. Overhead board flashes On Time, Track 2.
There are two empty seats adjacent to a scruffy, long bearded old man. He’s wearing a heavy jacket, way too heavy for August. A rollerboard stands to his right. His head bowed, sleeping. You’re asking for trouble. Find another seat. I look around, and can’t find another seat. I catch others watching me, judging, ‘The Suit won’t come near That.’
And Mind, ever so efficient, calls up a Marie Howe poem, The Star Market:
“The people Jesus loved were shopping at the Star Market yesterday. An old lead-colored man standing next to me at the checkout breathed so heavily I had to step back a few steps. Even after his bags were packed he still stood, breathing hard and hawking into his hand. The feeble, the lame, I could hardly look at them: shuffling through the aisles, they smelled of decay..Jesus must have been a saint, I said to myself…stumbling among the people who would have been lowered into rooms by ropes, who would have crept out of caves or crawled from the corners of public baths on their hands and knees begging for mercy. If I touch only the hem of his garment, one woman thought, could I bear the look on his face when he wheels around?”
He lifts his head, turns towards me and stares. I freeze. The Others are now watching. I pause, and make my move.
I take the seat next to Him.
Others watch for a moment, eyebrows raised, and then go back to their smartphones. Did you do it because you wanted a seat? Or because others would think less of You, or that you didn’t want this Suit to meet their expectations? Or because you didn’t want Him to think you thought any less of Him?
There’s one empty seat between us. But there’s tension in the gap. He turns to look at me, I can feel his eyes on me. Here it comes, Can you help me out with a few bucks, Sir?”
He sits silently. [Read more…]
