Fresh as a daisy

Ah, love.

This is how the story ends:

To the accompaniment of Victor's snoring, Ali-Baba reviewed her life and swallowed the pills. The next morning Victor found her lying facedown on the desk. He read her note and called an ambulance. Paramedics pumped Ali-Baba's stomach, then took her to a mental hospital. Shaking with a hangover, Victor pulled on some clothes and trotted off to work to wait for the liquor store to open.

Ali-Baba was lying in a clean bed in a ward for the insane. She would stay there at least a month. Soon there would be a hot breakfast and conversation with a family doctor. Later, as she knew, her neighbors would swap life stories. Ali-Baba also had a story or two to share. She wanted to tell them, for example, about the first time she took pills, when she went blind for twenty-four hours. The second time put her to sleep for two days, but the sixth time she woke up in the morning fresh as a daisy.

That's how one of the stories ends. But all the stories end like this, just life continuing without end. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's slim volume of love stories, There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself, is brutal and true.

In the introduction, translator Anna Summers writes:

Petrushevskaya's genius as a literary artist lies in her ability to make the strangeness of her mothers, her would-be mothers, her once-were mothers, and her other characters worthy of our sympathy in the partial absence of our understanding. The changes she introduces in vocabulary, perspective, rhythm, and intonation sneak up on us, and before we know it we have implicitly forgive bizarre, bewildering, and often vulgar behaviors and qualities.

These stories are small, as small as the lives they depict. Very many of them are forgettable lives. They are also surprisingly light; they waft away.

I read these stories last month, even though my husband had just left me for a younger woman. And they made me feel better. Because other people's lives are so much more tragic than mine. Although, I was drunk for much of the time I was reading.

Life, love — all of it is so inconsequential.

Reviews
A.V. Club
Bookslut
New York Times

Screen test

I've been watching some of Andy Warhol's screen tests on Youtube.

Some of them are very boring. Indeed, I lose interest in most of them by about the 30-second mark. This surprises me, because I'm generally a patient person who gives my undivided attention to things (like very long books and arthouse movies).

But a few of them really intrigue me — those with particularly interesting faces, or whom I know something about (like Edie Sedgwick, and everything I know about her I learned from Claire Messud's novel The Woman Upstairs).

As part of a course on Andy Warhol, we were invited to use the Vine app to create our own screen tests.

So I "screen-tested" my daughter for a full 6 seconds. And what I got out of the exercise is something I've always known in theory, but here I felt it firsthand: that the picture or video is more about the relationship between the watcher and the watched than it is about the image itself being captured. A kind of still portrait but over time.

The Vine exercise was part of the MOOC's opening unit, on celebrity. And the ensuing discussions continue to be quite provocative, on the nature of celebrity, on cultivating persona, on the phenomenon of social media. Has our promised 15 minutes in fact shrunken to mere seconds? And I wonder how interested I would be in Warhol's art if it weren't for the fact of his own celebrity.

**********

Warhol Mania is on at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts until March 15. It's a small exhibit (2 rooms) but tightly focused on Warhol's posters (including for Perrier) and magazine work.

Because it consists entirely of "printed" work, there's no real "aha" moment such as I've experienced in seeing some other artworks (say, in terms of the colour and texture of a painting). However, it's interesting to see Warhol's works grouped: e.g., his illustrations of shoes and accessories for ladies magazines. And I learned, sadly, that much of Warhol's original work would've been destroyed — typically, the magazine itself is seen as the finished product, and working files aren't retained.

Understanding how to live the experience of a garment

I can recognize a disciple of La Sape from miles away. This watchman is a master at applying the foundational principles of the society, including the sacrosanct rule of the Trilogy. Three colours for an ensemble, not one more, not one less. Dressing in accordance with principles of La Sape means knowing how to display flamboyant arrangements: a three-piece Dior suit with Weston crocodile shoes, why not. It's showing off your white merino wool tailcoat, your McQueen tie, your mahogany pipe, your cane with a "system" that includes, in the handle of the shaft, a compartment for storing cutlery, sometimes a weapon. Being a good sapologist involves exploring fabrics, patterns, accessories; it's about understanding how to live the experience of a garment.

— from Ravenscrag, by Alain Farah.

La Sape: la Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes.

Serious sociological reflection

Georges Simenon was born on Friday, February 13 — 102 years ago. Last Friday, A Different Stripe posted a great quote about it:

"It's a boy," she stammered. As for him, with a complete lack of self-restraint, he said, crying all the while:

"I shall never, never forget that you have just given me the greatest joy a woman can give a man..."

"Désiré... Listen... What time is it?"

The child had been born at ten past twelve. Élise whispered:

"Listen, Désiré... He's come into the world on a Friday the thirteenth... Nobody must know... You must beg that woman..."

And that was why, the next morning, when Désiré, accompanied by his brother Arthur as a witness, went to register the child's birth at the Town Hall, he told the clerk, with an innocent expression:

"Roger Mamelin, born at Liége, at No. 18, Rue Léopold, on Thursday 12 February 1903."

That's from Pedigree, Simenon's novelization of his own life, which I have not yet read.

As if to chide me, there's also an excellent essay by Elliott Colla on "Maigret's Jurisdiction" in the LA Review of Books:

By mapping out the emergent networks of French modernity as a sprawling social geography, Simenon turned crime writing toward serious sociological reflection. Take, for instance, the enigmatic opening lines of Pietr the Latvian: "ICPC to PJ Paris Xvzust Krakow vimontra m ghks triv psot uv Pietr-le-Letton Bremen vs tyz btolem." Maigret translates the phrase, which, we learn, is composed in the language of a continental network of police agencies. Rendered legible, the words read: "International Criminal Police Commission to Police Judiciaire in Paris: Krakow police report sighting Pietr the Latvian en route to Bremen." The next memo reads: "Polizei-Präsidium Bremen to PJ Paris: Pietr the Latvian reported en route Amsterdam and Brussels." These memos and others sketch a colorful map of overlapping networks: a rail that could take a Latvian national through Poland and Germany, then Holland and Belgium and on to France; a police network linking the national polices of these various countries in a single system of knowledge and surveillance; and, of course, a communication network linking these two systems — rail and policing — to one another in real-time.

The rest of the novel fills out this geography, and indicates just how exhilarating and terrifying it was for Simenon to witness the emergence of this interwar landscape where polyglot nations intersected and interpenetrated each other by way of crime and interdiction. Bodies, goods, and information travel back and forth across borders with near infinite possibilities. This movement is what makes crime possible, by allowing men to leave their pasts behind or to inhabit more than one identity at a time.

All those Maigret reissues to explore. And I still have a few old Simenon paperbacks that I dug up in second-hand shops lying around, unread. And there are several untranslated works also available to me to practice my French. I have a feeling I'll be getting back to basic, serious sociological reflection with Simenon very soon.

And what does our purportedly decluttered mind now allow us to do?

Do you use an online dictionary? Have you ever "liked" a word, or shared it on social media? Have you ever commented on a dictionary entry? I mean, by leaving a comment that satisfies the prompt (What made you want to look up ___? Please tell us where you read or heard it.). I've often wondered why anyone would be motivated to do that, apart from students of English as a second language, who seem quite genuine in their queries regarding usage. But what if you could vote a word up or down? What if its definition were crowdsourced? What if its shape, meaning, sound, morphed as data was received?

What if it all happened with the aid of the technology of our very near future, with a kind of Google Glass or a chip integrated directly into our neural network? Among its other functions for day-to-day living (hailing cabs, making payments, checking contact details, researching background info — with less than a blink of the eye), it would fulfill linguistic services, not only looking up unknown words and supplying their meanings but suggesting entire conversational tacks. What if you could devise a business model that earned you money for every look-up, while dumbing down the culture and creating a dependence on your service? You might need a monopoly on the dictionary industry first, of course.

It is comforting to believe that consigning small decisions to a device frees up our brains for more important things. But that begs the question, which things have been deemed more important? And what does our purportedly decluttered mind now allow us to do? Express ourselves? Concentrate? Think? Or have we simply carved out more time for entertainment? Anxiety? Dread?

We fear that Memes may have a paradoxical effect — that indeed, contrary to Synchronic's claims, they tend to narrow rather than expand consciousness, to the point where our most basic sense of self — our interior I — has started to be eclipsed. Our facility for reflection has dimmed, taking with it our skill for deep and unfettered thinking. And another change is taking place: our capacity for communication is fading.

In the most extreme cases, Meme users have been losing language. Not esoteric bits of linguistic debris but everyday words: ambivalence, paradox, naïve. The more they forget, the more dependent on the device they become, a frightening cycle that only amplifies and that has grown to engulf another of Synchronic's innovations, the Word Exchange.

The Word Exchange, by Alena Graedon, is on its surface a mystery story — a search for a missing person. But soon enough it takes on thriller-like aspects, with corporate intrigue on an international stage. But it's also a linguistic nerd's dream. It covers synchronic versus diachronic approaches to language study, the basics of lexicography, Hegel's philosophy of language (Graedon acknowledges guidance from Jim Vernon), the theory of universal grammar, book burnings, Jabberwocky-type nonsense and countless references to Lewis Carroll's wonderland ("When I use a word, [...] it means just what I choose it to mean.").

Also, secret libraries and pneumatic tubes!

What if the Word Exchange were hacked, and everyone who used the device were infected with Word Flu, effectively losing language?

Maybe Hegel had it wrong: laber there's no mystical link between the speaker of a word and the recipient of its sound. Maybe language isn't unity but domination. Unilateral. Unkind.

Fantastic premise, wonderful vocabulary usage. Mostly interesting characters. Somewhat uneven pacing, but it's Graedon's first novel.

Interview
Bustle: Q&A: Alena Graedon on 'The Word Exchange': The Influence and Influenza of Words

Reviews
New York Times: World Wide Web
Slate: When Smartphones Attack
Tor.com: Science Fiction Saves the Dictionary: The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon
Toronto Star: The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon: review

New books from Anansi

The kind people at House of Anansi Press, have been sending me some lovely books over the last couple of months that I haven't had a chance to read yet. I'm still playing catch-up with reading books received at Christmas, and otherwise generally drowning in life.

(One of the best things about Anansi books? French flaps! I love French flaps!)

The Gallery of Lost Species, by Nina Berkhout, is about Edith, who believes she saw a unicorn. She takes a job cataloguing art where she meets a cryptozoologist searching for "Gauguin's mystery bird."

Ravenscrag, by Alain Farah, takes place in Montreal but spans two time periods separated by 50 years. Nefarious psychiatric experiments and a gothic manor. It's billed as a blend of retro science fiction and autobiography.

The Other Joseph, by Skip Horack, is a journey across America in search of redemption.

When the Doves Disappeared, by Sofi Oksanen, explores the occupation, resistance, and collaboration in Estonia during and after World War II. Passion and betrayal!

So, which one do I read first?

Pop

"I think the artists who aren't very good should become like everybody else so that people would like things that aren't very good. It's already happening."
— Andy Warhol

This week I got back into the MOOC swing, after a couple months' hiatus, with a course on Andy Warhol. The course is structured around the major themes that framed his life and art. After providing a brief introduction to pop art, the focus of week one is celebrity, and touched on topics such as the star system and the appropriation of images in the media. (I'll have more to say about this course in the weeks to come; as well, I'm set to see a Warhol exhibit at the museum this weekend.)

So it's an interesting coincidence that every morning on my way to work I pass through what is currently a portrait gallery of artists as children, and one of those children is Andy Warhol. The exhibit is Voix d'ailleurs, by Quebec artist Louis Boudreault. Already the course material has given me a new perspective on this collection.

Taken individually, the paintings are fairly nondescript, in a neutral palette, and subjects that are almost expressionless. As a collection, however, they fare somewhat better — to stand amid child-Picasso, child-Pollock, child-Kandinsky, child-Disney does in fact give pause for thought about the seeds of greatness.

These portraits recently replaced another set of Quebec icons as children, among them such greats as Maurice Richard and Emile Nelligan. Frankly, the Quebec set was more interesting, with a hairstyle or the turn of a collar readily evoking a different time and place. The collection of artists, on the other hand, has a bland uniformity, as if all art springs from the same place. To me this indicates that Boudreault is closer to his Quebec roots than to the artist community, perhaps a better Quebecker than he is an artist.

I think a lot my current self was present in my childhood self. What do you think: can you look at a child and see what they will become?

The book cover that judges you

The cover that judges you.
More.
Via.

I'm not convinced that a book should demand neutrality from its reader.

Neither present nor past

From the entry for Otha Orkkut (1890-1943), poet, translator, and historian, in The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure, edited by C.D. Rose:

Cimbrian, it is said, was a unique language in that it contained a tense which was used to describe a person or object which had gone missing or been lost: neither present nor past, still existing in a space or time which no non-Cimbrian can ever properly comprehend.

A number of critics and translators are currently at work on Orkkut's books, her manuscripts now inhabiting the realm of that unique Cimbrian tense.

Identified as a Bothno-Ugaric language, "Cimbrian" may be referencing the same language known in Italo Calvino's quarters as "Cimmerian," described by Professor Uzzi-Tuzzi as "a modern language and a dead language at the same time."

I treated myself to this lovely volume at Christmas, to add to my shelf of weird dictionaries. This collection of 52 lives, by turns tragic and comic, easily lends itself to browsing; I reach for it for inspiration, for reminders, for warnings.

The introduction alone is worth the price of admission, exploring the concepts of erasure, "faith in the ineffable," linguistic negation, "literature of the unword," "stories that would prefer not to."

Reviews
Biographile: "The simple fact is this: books are real; writers aren't."
PopMatters: "It's questionable whether insanity is a prerequisite for the arts."

Excerpt.

Reading can transport you

Montreal metro stations this week have been filled with bookshelves, stocked with virtual books.

In a campaign cosponsored by various transit commissions and library associations, the commuting public is being encouraged to read.

First chapters of 60 books that span genres are available for free for instant download, just by scanning a smart code or entering a URL (or they can be accessed from the campaign website). The books are available in French only (I believe Louise Penny bears the distinction of being the only English-language author on the list, in French translation).

So far it's inspired fun waiting times when I'm with my daughter (and therefore not actually reading): "Oh, I read that," "That book looks interesting," and infinite I Spy possibilities. But I may yet download a chapter of two to practice my French.

Transit-goers may or may not be getting the point — it's really heard to tell what they're doing on their phones. I'd love to see the download and usage stats at campaign's end.

Lire vous transporte. (Video.)

Unperturbed by that appalling fact

Zebra, by Victor Vasarely

The following days were strange. It was as is until then we had all been dreaming and had suddenly woken to real life, although occasionally it seemed to be the other way round, as if we had all been plunged into a dream. And we went on living day by day in accordance with the abnormal conventions of the dream-world: anything can happen and whatever happens the dreamer accepts it. Movement works differently. We move like gazelles or the way gazelles move in a tiger's dream. We move like a painting by Vassarely. We move as if we had no shadows and were unperturbed by that appalling fact. We speak. We eat. But underneath we are trying not to realize that we are speaking and eating.

— from By Night in Chile, by Roberto Bolaño.

[Who'd've thought that Bolaño's description upon the toppling of Allende's government would be so apt in conveying how it feels for an 18-year relationship to end.]

I reread this book for book club; in fact, I'd suggested it. What strikes me now is that for a book whose jacket copy touts the "clandestine view of the strange bedfellows of Church and State in Chile," there's remarkably little church in this novel, and not very much politics either. The politics that are there are presented nonjudgmentally; it'd be impossible to peg the narrator, or the author, as a leftist or otherwise on the basis of this text.

It strikes me also that this novella is in many way 2666 in miniature, with its lit critics and German writers, spaceships (yes) and labyrinthine torture basements. "An assortment of fruits and vegetables worthy of Archimboldo." The cultivation of art alongside some horror.

What the narrator expresses in the excerpt above, as well as in some of the anecdotes throughout the book — in particular, that of the Guatemalan painter in Paris, and the shoemaker whose dream of Heroes' Hill became his own crypt — where lassitude meets boredom, and a glimpse of immortality catalyzes it into some form of existential ennui, is some infernal detachment haunted by a secret knowledge. "That's how literature is made."

"It's good to love. It's bad to be impressionable."

He is a bridge

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman — a rope over an abyss.

A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

— from Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche.

Speculation

The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three.

I've had trouble reading lately. Doing much of anything really. I can't focus, yet I need to distract myself.

Enter Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation. It's damn near the most perfect book I could've hope for, for my here and now. "The wife is praying a little. To Rilke, she thinks."

It mirrors my reality, so that I may reflect upon it. I want to read it again immediately.

It's the story of love and marriage and a lovely daughter, and betrayal.

Taller?
Thinner?
Quieter?
Easier, he says.

I also was not a good wife. I also go to yoga to cry.

The wife has never not wanted to be married to him. This sounds false but it is true.

She has wanted to sleep with other people, of course. One or two in particular. But the truth is she has good impulse control. That is why she isn't dead. Also why she became a writer instead of a heroin addict. She thinks before she acts. Or more properly, she thinks instead of acts. A character flaw, not a virtue.

It's so hard to be kind.

Reviews
"The Smallest Possible Disaster," by Elaine Blair in The New York Review of Books:

In the history of the novel, female adulterous desire has been a major force, female jealousy a minor one.

"Bridled Vows" by Roxane Gay in The New York Times:

The wife's pain and sorrow are rendered through a wryer brand of observation as she becomes the betrayed. It is easy to feel for her because she is a desperately interesting character. Each newly disclosed flaw only makes her more compelling. In fact, we know everything about the wife and how she thinks and feels and moves through the world. It is much more difficult to feel anything about the marriage because the husband is so secondary a character. He is an accessory and a bit player in the wife's meditations.

(My husband was always a secondary character.)

"Mother Courage," by James Woods, in The New Yorker:

If it is a distressed account of a marriage in distress, it is also a poem in praise of the married state. If it brutally tears apart the boredom and frustrations of parenthood, it also solidly inhabits the joys and consolations of having a child. If it laments the work not done, the books not written, the aspirations unfulfilled, it also represents work well done, a book written, the fruit of aspiration. [...] It is often extremely funny, and often painful; earnestly direct but glancingly ironic, even whimsical.

The anatomy of jealousy

Jealousy everywhere. I'm living and breathing it.

I read Alain Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy several years ago. I never got around to reviewing it here, but I recall noting that I might've interpreted it rather differently if it weren't for its title, if I hadn't known what it was supposed to be about. It couldn't be read cold. A weirdly dispassionate telling was suddenly imbued with a passionate external interpretation.

In The New York Review of Books, Diane Johnson considers the theme of jealousy in the light of a couple of books that I'm not sure I would ever have thought to group together, including Jealousy, by Peter Toohey:

One of Toohey's more interesting findings is that a morbidly jealous person (as opposed to "normally" jealous) is especially zealous in seeking "visual evidence to confirm the truth of the way they are feeling"; Othello must see Desdemona's handkerchief. This visual element makes film a particularly suitable medium for expressing jealousy. He suggests that stalking also arises from the visual need.

Toohey uses Robbe-Grillet's novel to illustrate a couple other points. I'm a little hung up on this novel at the moment and want to revisit it, having just watched Last Year at Marienbad (for which Robbe-Grillet wrote the screenplay) the other week.

Johnson also references Happy Are the Happy, a book of short stories by Yasmina Reza, which has just sky-rocketed to the top of my wishlist.

See also An Ode to Envy, a TED Talk by Parul Sehgal, an editor for The New York Times Book Review:

Jealousy is exhausting. It's a hungry emotion. It must be fed. [...] Jealousy is a hungry emotion. Jealousy like information. Jealousy likes detail. That's why Instagram is such a hit. Proust actually links the language of scholarship and jealousy. When Swann is in his jealous throes, and suddenly he's listening at doorways and bribing his mistress' servants, he defends these behaviors. He says, "You know, look, I know you think this is repugnant, but it is no different from interpreting an ancient text or looking at a monument." He says, "They are scientific investigations with real intellectual value." Proust is trying to show us that jealousy feels intolerable and makes us look absurd, but it is, at its crux, a quest for knowledge, a quest for truth, painful truth, and actually, where Proust is concerned, the more painful the truth, the better. Grief, humiliation, loss: These were the avenues to wisdom for Proust. He says, "A woman whom we need, who makes us suffer, elicits from us a gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us." Is he telling us to just go and find cruel women? No. I think he's trying to say that jealousy reveals us to ourselves. And does any other emotion crack us open in this particular way? Does any other emotion reveal to us our aggression and our hideous ambition and our entitlement? Does any other emotion teach us to look with such peculiar intensity?

If you had a crooked heart

It is important if someone asks you to remember one of your happiest times to consider not only the question but also the questioner. If the question is asked by someone you love, it is fair to assume that this person hopes to feature in this recollection he has called forth. But you could, if you were wrong and if you had a crooked heart, forget this most obvious and endearing thing and instead speak of a time you were all alone, in the country, with no one wanting a thing from you, not even love. You could say that was your happiest time. And if you did this then telling about this happiest of times would cause the person you want to be happy to be unhappy.

— from Dept. of Speculation, by Jenny Offill.

I sometimes think I have a crooked heart.

She cried that night

Stanisław Barańczak — poet, dissident, and translator — died last week. Here's a poem I found, translated by the poet himself with Clare Cavanagh.

She Cried That Night, but Not for Him to Hear

She cried that night, but not for him to hear.
In fact her crying wasn't why he woke.
It was some other sound; that much was clear.

And this half-waking shame. No trace of tears
all day, and still at night she works to choke
the sobs; she cries, but not for him to hear.

And all those other nights: she lay so near
but he had only caught the breeze's joke,
the branch that tapped the roof. That much was clear.

The outside dark revolved in its own sphere:
no wind, no window pane, no creaking oak
had said: "She's crying, not for you to hear."

Untouchable are those tangibly dear,
so close, they're closed, too far to reach and stroke
a quaking shoulder-blade. This much is clear.

And he did not reach out — for shame, for fear
of spoiling the tears' tenderness that spoke:
"Go back to sleep. What woke you isn't here.
It was the wind outside, indifferent, clear."

I quite love this poem already. It resonates with me because... it resonates.

But here's the poem in Polish.

Płakała w nocy, ale nie jej płacz go zbudził

Płakała w nocy, ale nie jej płacz go zbudził.
Nie był płaczem dla niego, chociaż mógł być o nim.
To był wiatr, dygot szyby, obce sprawom ludzi.

I półprzytomny wstyd: że ona tak się trudzi,
to, co tłumione, czyniąc podwójnie tłumionym
przez to, że w nocy płacze. Nie jej płacz go zbudził:

ile więc było wcześniej nocy, gdy nie zwrócił
uwagi — gdy skrzyp drewna, trzepiąca o komin
gałąź, wiatr, dygot szyby związek z prawdą ludzi

negowały staranniej: ich szmer gasł, nim wrzucił
do skrzynki bezsenności rzeczowy anonim:
"Płakała w nocy, chociaż nie jej płacz cię zbudził"?

Na wyciągnięcie ręki — ci dotkliwie drudzy,
niedotykalnie drodzy ze swoim "Śpij, pomiń
snem tę wilgoć poduszki, nocne prawo ludzi".

I nie wyciągnął ręki. Zakłóciłby, zbrudził
toporniejszą tkliwością jej tkliwość: "Zapomnij.
Płakałam w nocy, ale nie mój płacz cię zbudził.
To był wiatr, dygot szyby, obce sprawom ludzi".

The first stanza of the translation is, to me, strikingly different from the original. While everything else essentially matches up, the opening sets a very different tone.

More literally, it'd be something like this...

She cried that night, but it's not her crying that woke him.
She wasn't crying for him, but it might've been about him.
It was the wind, a rattling window pane, other people's odd business.

So while the official translation maintains the rhyme, rhythm, matter-of-factness of the original, it turns on generality. There is something altogether more pointed and tragic about the original. She might be crying about him.

I've always enjoyed comparing poems in translation, and I marvel at the translators' feat. It demands emotional precision more than technical exactitude.

But to my ear, this English translation is a very different poem.

Where is the damp pillow? A person's right to sleep at night?

Full of things that have never been

And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious and great things.

— from Rainer Maria Rilke, in a letter to Clara Rilke, January 1, 1907.

Hear me, world. I demand necessary, serious, and great things.

Holding the universe together

The most beautiful sentences...

She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.

— from "A Girl I Knew," by J.D. Salinger.

That used to be me, I was that girl. But my universe has crumbled apart. Someone else holds his universe together now.

That showy dark crack running down the middle of a life

I spent some hours at the bookstore this afternoon, wanting something but not finding anything that satisfied. I picked up Donna Tartt's The Secret History, but then I put I put it back down again. It starts this way:

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does.

Me too. I didn't think it existed. But now I do.

The narrator believes his flaw to be "a morbid longing for the picturesque." I think that's fairly benign.

I'm not convinced how showy the crack is, but sadly, I have little trouble identifying flaws — gaping voids — in others. I have much less insight into my own shortcomings.

Stillness

Much-needed stillness these days...

The amount of data humanity will collect while you're reading this book is five times greater than the amount that exists in the Library of Congress. Anyone reading this book will take in as much information today as Shakespeare took in over a lifetime. Researchers in the new field of interruption science have found that it takes an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from a phone call. Yet such interruptions come every eleven minutes — which means we're never caught up with our lives.

— from The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere, by Pico Iyer.



"Finding what feels like real life, that changeless and inarguable something behind all our shifting thoughts, is less a discovery than a recollection."