“A lot of the time I’d get that feeling like I was in the middle of a huge black ocean, or deep in space, but not in the fascinating way. It’s just that everything was incredibly far away from me. It was worst at night. I started inventing things, and then I couldn’t stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it’s because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn’t constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That’s how my brain was.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer #
“The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,
a dance floor built on springs—
all memory resolves itself in gaze,
in panoramic green you know the cattle eat
or two stacks high above the town,
two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse
for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.”
—Richard Hugo #
“If you could, and it had no negative consequences, would you jump forward in time to the end of what you’re currently doing?”
Change everything so you can answer ‘no’ as often as possible. #
All hearts to the adjective “submarine.” From Jasperdo’s photostream. #
Climbing the wrong hill
This post hasn’t really left my skull since I read it a few weeks ago. Hill climbing is a great metaphor for all sorts of problems. #
“Sometimes the newer kids who won’t even let him near them come in and set the resistance on the shoulder-pull at a weight greater than their own weight. The guru on the towel dispenser just sits there and smiles and doesn’t say anything. They hunker, then, and grimace, and try to pull the bar down, but, like, lo: the overweighted shoulder-pull becomes a chin-up. Up they go, their own bodies, toward the bar they’re trying to pull down. Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself.”
—David Foster Wallace #
The Prismatarium at the Aquatic Park Bathhouse, “functioning in relation to the field of color much as the Planetarium does for the heavens.” From Jef Poskanzer’s photostream. (via) #
“All this, and much more, she had accepted, for, after all, living does mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case, mere possibilities of improvement. She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer.”
—Vladimir Nabokov #
No one knows how to make a pencil
My bit of metal—the ferrule—is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain.
I’d take a few more pages. From Leonard Read’s fantastic I, Pencil. (via) #
“I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.” —Pablo Neruda #
“In the sedate neighborhood where he now lived, everyone was old, more or less. For years he had watched the neighbor to his right, a widower, slowly deteriorate, his stride becoming a shuffle, his house and yard gradually growing shabbier and shaggier, inch by inch, season by season, in increments so small that only a speeded-up film would show the process. The two men would converse across the fence from time to time; Fanshawe once or twice offered to do some pruning for his neighbor. ‘No, thanks,’ would be the answer. ‘I’ll get to it, when I’m feeling a little more lively.’ We look ahead and see random rises and falls; the linear diminishment so plain to others is invisible to us.”
—John Updike #
