I can't sleep…
Sometimes he thinks of her, of them. Of what could have been.
Sometimes it’s all he thinks about…
He can feel the weight of their lives in a single step forward.
And he is enchanted by the beauty of small things:
hot coffee,
wind through an open window,
the tapping of rain,
a passing bicycle…
— Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After
Notes: Quote via see more. Photo: Milka Awgul
I felt at home, strangely, because it is a miniature world.… One manor house, one farmhouse. A vineyard, a field of potatoes, a field of wheat, a cherry tree, an orchard. It has one of everything, so it is in a sense an ark. It is like when you draw a place when you are a child. I don’t like large-scale things, not in architecture or evolutionary leaps. I think it’s an aberration. This notion of something that is small and self-contained is for me a moral and aesthetic ideal.
~ W.G. Sebald, A Place in the Country
Image: Cristiana Coucerio for The New Yorker,
There’s strength in observing one’s miniaturization. That you are insignificant and prone to, and God knows, dumb about a lot. Because doesn’t smallness prime us to eventually take up space? For instance, the momentum gained from reading a great book. After after, sitting, sleeping, living in its consequence. A book that makes you feel, finally, latched on. Or after after we recover from a hike. From seeing fifteenth-century ruins and wondering how Machu Picchu was built when Incans had zero knowledge of the wheel. Smallness can make you feel extra porous. Extra ambitious. Like a small dog carrying an enormous branch clenched in its teeth, as if intimating to the world: Okay. Where to?
~ Durga Chew-Bose, from “Heart Museum” in Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays
Photo: Paul Nicol with Walk Softly. Carry a Big Stick.
The Pantheon of Smallness was a way of thinking about smallness differently. Sometimes we make small things, sometimes there are small bird songs, but it can have an enormous impact. Sometimes you have to whisper to be heard. Our culture is very much one of “bigging it up,” always upping the noise level in order to produce a louder signal. What you see in the bird world is sometimes that the smallest tweet can actually pierce through the cacophony in a different way. That became a metaphor for thinking about art. Emily Dickinson did quite miniature work that had a very profound, almost epic, impact, culturally speaking.
~ Kyo Maclear, from How a stressed woman found solace through looking at birds (Macleans, January 22, 2017)
Find Kyo Maclear’s new book on Amazon: Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation
Photo: Thank you Sawsan @ Last Tambourine
Bad things are going to happen…
No matter how many vitamins you take,
how much Pilates, you’ll lose your keys,
your hair and your memory…
Your wallet will be stolen, you’ll get fat,
slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel
and crack your hip. You’ll be lonely.
Oh taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.
~ Ellen Bass, excerpt from Relax
Notes: