Stupid, maybe, but probably not all that unusual

“I hadn’t known that I assumed he would wait there forever in that white bed below his window. I hadn’t known I needed him there. Like a landmark, a pyramid-shaped stone or a cypress, that we assume will never move. So we can find our way home. And then, inevitably, one day–it’s gone. And we realize that we thought we were the only changing thing, the only variable, in the world, that the objects and people in our lives are there for our pleasure, like the playing pieces of a game, and cannot move of their own accord; that they are held in place by our need for them, by our love. How stupid.”

“Less,” Andrew Sean Greer

Notes from “A Tale for the Time Being”

Just finished this wonderful novel by Ruth Ozeki.

I won’t spoil it, but there are a few things I highlighted that seemed worth sharing here.

Comparing reading typed text and written:

“Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.”

“…but they weren’t tears. She wasn’t crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.”

“Both life and death manifest in every moment of existence. Our human body appears and disappears moment by moment, without cease, and this ceaseless arising and passing away is what we experience as time and being. They are not separate. They are one thing, and in even a fraction of a second, we have the opportunity to choose, and to turn the course of our action either toward the attainment of truth or away from it. Each instant is utterly critical to the whole world.”

“The ancient Greeks believed that when you read aloud, it was actually the dead, borrowing your tongue, in order to speak again.”

“…not-knowing keeps all the possibilities open. It keeps all the worlds alive.”

If you haven’t read it yet, get thee hence.

testament

One of the most beautiful testaments to love I’ve ever read — Pip to Estella in Great Expectations:

“…You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since—on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!”

Ann Carson

Epitaph: Evil

To get the sound take everything that is not the sound drop it
Down a well, listen.
Then drop the sound. Listen to the difference
Shatter.

This life

Y’know, it’s all so beautiful and perfect while at exactly the same time sad and difficult and never at all what we expected, it’s almost too much to bear sometimes.

What is this life, anyway?

Chocolate pudding, and children with beautiful eyes, and just the right wine with just the right dinner.

Sigh.

beautiful

from Nightclub, by Billy Collins

. . .We are all so foolish,
my long bebop solo begins by saying,
so damn foolish
we have become beautiful without even knowing it.

well, okay then

Read this.

It glows, too.

And so do you.

if you click the picture, you can read the article

I am a total Rafa Nadal fan.

And not just because he has great legs.

He is a true athlete, and warrior. He looks like he’s sneering, but he’s actually just concentrating. He’s dauntless and fearless and completely unflappable.

I want to be him when I grow up.

Except for the Spanish tennis-playing part, of course. That would be weird. And impossible.

 

The Time of Secrets

A huge red sun would be setting far away in a sulphurous sea, our shadows would already be long: their feet sticking to our soles, they would slide on our right over the surface of the kermes oaks, be slashed in two, in passing, by a pine tree trunk and suddenly loom vertical against a golden rock face. The first hardly perceptible evening breeze flowed towards us from the hilltops. In the sky, a black flight of starlings dived and soared again, changing in size and shape along unexpected curves, like an ant-hill carried away by the wind, and then, amid the resinous silence of the pine-woods, a few lost notes of the angelus of Allauch would evangelize the echoes of the cliffs.

I had not forgotten my love, but my grief took on the tinge of the season: it was a wistful regret, a tender melancholy which recomposed my memories. I had obliterated the humiliating ordeals, the poet on all fours on the road and the devastating last appearance of the Cassignol family. I saw two violet-blue eyes across a sheaf of irises, a bunch of blue grapes before half-open lips, and, on the singing swing, the brown nape of a little girl who was pointing her white sandals towards the quivering boughs of an olive tree . . . Then, in my dreams at night, I would hear distant music and the little red queen would glide away, infinitely sad and lonely, under the gloomy arches of the forests of long ago.

~ Marcel Pagnol

 

I know it’s not, technically, “poetry,” but anything this lovely, and said this beautifully, is.

mesmerizing

I don’t know about you, but I was holding my breath by the end.

(and an interesting juxtaposition between her grace, concentration, and calm and the judge whose biggest achievement that day was in her virtuosic wielding of a can of hairspray)