DK Photo. October 22, 2022. Calf Pasture Beach, Norwalk, CT
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
“Self-examination? I’m ripe for it, always. As much now as ever. I’m sure there’s never an end to it. No full closure.” […]
What sort of “Goldblum mania”?
“I don’t think I’ve ever said to anybody out loud. If anything, most everybody would get the impression that I’m doing well, that I’m comparatively stable, full of purpose and focus. But just between me and me? Let me see. Garden variety moments of anxiety, possibly.” He goes on to talk about sometimes running out of patience with his young sons and his frustration with himself about that. “They are primal. They’re experiencing raw, unexpurgated life. And in proximity to it, at least I find, I don’t know about you, things come up in me more readily and fully. Including temper.” […]
I ask Goldblum how he talks to his boys about masculinity and their behaviour as men in the world. He thinks, pouting. “Off the top of my head, masculinity overlaps into good humanity, no matter what gender. Which is an ethical, honest and authentic morality; a contributive, caring kindness; a loving navigation through the world.” He prefers to ask a different question of his sons: “How do you be a good person?”
He’ll say to them, “‘Listen. I don’t want to step on your spirit, or suppress you, or hog-tie you. But you’re in this world. Don’t hurt each other. Take care of yourselves. Have regard for the gift of your own human life. Have regard and respect for the lives of others.’” He says he has a general approach to life that he cribbed from a book of philosophy by Sam Harris: “Always tell the truth. Don’t even go, ‘Hey! I love your sweater!’ Or don’t go backstage and say, ‘You were great, you were spectacular!’ Graciousness and elegance demand that sometimes you need to not tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, all the time, to everybody. You have to honour kindness over cruelty and be sensitive to somebody’s feelings. But don’t lie.” […]
You’re tactile, I say to Goldblum. Is it that you think you need to feel things to understand things?
“Probably so. Human beings do. I like to. I’m glad I have my vision. I certainly like to hear. Smelling is very important to me. I’m a big taster. And then last, I believe, is … Yes, I like how things feel. I do like to feel things.”
(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.
Some days I am very raw, as though my outer layers have been peeled away, exposing the new parts of myself to the wind and the sea spray… I feel very sensitive to different consistencies of light. The speed of the wind. The pull of my clothes against my arms. Everything has a texture. I had stopped noticing it. I have a new pleasure in holding objects. A cold, round apple is solid in the palm of my hand. I stroke the smooth, hard squares of Scrabble letters. I run my fingers over the rough wooden surface of the table. I wonder if this is how my mother felt when we came here during those long, brooding summers.
~ Jessica Andrews, Saltwater: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, January 14, 2020)
I loved it. Recommended for you? Hmmmm. Read a Kindle sample to get a taste.
The horses do not…
lower themselves without reason…
Ask a woman
from Ohio about actual horses
& they will be able to move,
sometimes without their body,
to places that feel like everywhere
now that they’ve been there…
