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“Pretty much anyone who feels they’ve ‘arrived’ anyplace is about to learn a) how much more they could be doing outside the narrowness of an often superficial ambition and b) the surprising number of things they had to give away through the opportunity costs and trade-offs that lead up to every theoretical milestone. It’s a real goddamned thistle, and it’s more than a little depressing.”
—Merlin Mann #

From Alexander Gronsky’s photostream. #

“That’s why it sometimes seems to me that music theory is one of the most despicable disciplines there is, because you’d probably label the bass of that magical chord a ‘passing tone,’ and once you’ve labeled it a passing tone it’s a bit deflating… doink!, it goes in the bin with all the other passing tones. Somewhat like passing through Trenton on your way to Philadelphia: unremarkable. In the same way, once you call something Spaghetti and Meatballs, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you’ve understood anything about pasta, or that you should serve it to paying customers, or why a pianist might eat such a ridiculous thing before a concert, or any of the related questions that might come up. Bach had that way of using passing tones so that you could meditate on the passing-ness of things, what it is to pass, to move on, to leave beauties behind… of labeling the labels with meaning, breathing life back into the most basic, even the most unassuming, words.”
—Jeremy Denk #

“By holding it tightly, I feel strangely more detached.”
—Evelyn Glennie, in her TED talk about how to listen #

“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. #

“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 #

Bas Jan Ader. (via It’s Nice That) #