“Life does not consist mainly – or even largely – of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one’s head.”
Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Autobiography, Volume 1 (Aegitas, Jun 5, 2015)
For most of my life, one thing led to the next. Each step bore its expected fruit. Every coincidence felt preordained. It was like innocence, like floating in syrup. People were brought to me. Luck unfurled at the slightest touch. I had a sense of the inevitability of things as they occurred. Every move felt part of a pattern, more intelligent than I was, and I merely had to step into the designated place. I knew this was my greatest duty—this was me fulfilling my role. But once I was married, my relationship to my destiny began to chance. The signs grew more obscure…The universe gave me no solid signs…All I saw were the smudges, prominently there on what otherwise would have been a pure white wall.
~ Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?: A Novel (Henry Holt and Co., June 19, 2012)
“The thing about performance, even if it’s only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities.”
Daniel Day-Lewis, in “Daniel Day Lewis: Acting Up” by Hilary De Vries in Rolling Stone Feb 8, 1990
Accepting that the world can do quite fine without us allows us to put down the burden of being corrective heroes and simply concentrate on absorbing the journey of being alive. Thus, our work is not to eliminate or re-create anything. Rather, like human fish, we are asked to experience meaning in the life that moves through the gill that is our heart. Ultimately, we are small living things awakened in the stream, not gods who carve out rivers. We cannot eliminate hunger, but we can feed each other. We cannot eliminate loneliness, but we can hold each other. We cannot eliminate pain, but we can live a life of compassion.
~ Mark Nepo, from The Book of Awakening (Conari Press; October 1, 2011)
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.
— Virginia Woolf, from “Modern Fiction,” Monday or Tuesday (Harcourt, 1921)
I will read long books and the journals of dead writers. I will feel closer to them than I ever felt to people I used to know before I withdrew from the world. It will be sweet and cool this friendship of mine with dead poets, for I won’t have to touch them or answer their questions. They will talk to me and not expect me to answer. And I’ll get sleepy listening to their voices explaining the mysteries to me. I’ll fall asleep with the book still in my fingers, and it will rain.“
- Tennessee Williams, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other One-Act Plays (New Directions, January 17, 1966)
No matter where you stood, you were no more than 10 feet from fried chicken. I crammed everything I could onto my double-thick paper plate. The sugar and grease pushed back the grief, just for a minute or two, long enough to breathe.
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned: I lust after greasy double cheeseburgers and fried chicken legs and Ruffles straight out of the bag. I covet hot Krispy Kreme donuts that melt on my tongue. I worship bowls full of peanut M&M’s, first savoring them one by one, then stuffing my mouth with handfuls, then wetting my finger to pick up those last bits of chocolate dust and candy shell. My brain pings with pleasure; my taste buds groan with desire. This happens over and over, day after day, and that is how I got here, closer to the end of my life than the beginning, weighing almost a quarter of a ton.
This is the terrible catch-22: The thing that soothes the pain prolongs it. The thing that brings me back to life pushes me closer to the grave…
Losing weight is a fucking rock fight. The enemies come from all sides: The deluge of marketing telling us to eat worse and eat more. The culture that has turned food into one of the last acceptable vices. Our families and friends, who want us to share in their pleasure. Our own body chemistry, dragging us back to the table out of fear that we’ll starve.
~ Tommy Tomlinson, from “The Weight I Carry. What it’s like to be too big in America” (The Atlantic · January 10, 2019)
“I, may I rest in peace – I, who am still living, say,
May I have peace in the rest of my life.
I want peace right now while I’m still alive.
I don’t want to wait like that pious man who wished for one leg
of the golden chair of Paradise, I want a four-legged chair
right here, a plain wooden chair. I want the rest of my peace now…
I don’t want to fulfill my parents’ prophecy that life is war.
I want peace with all my body and all my soul.
Rest me in peace.”
~ Yehuda Amichai, from “In My Life, On My Life” in The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (Macmillan, Nov 3, 2015)
Had she come out here for me? An excitement rose in my being just to think it. But I didn’t say a word. Instead, we smoked together quietly, and as she exhaled, the trees touched each other’s branches in the wind.
~ Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?: A Novel (Henry Holt and Co., June 19, 2012)
“How could anything not good come from ‘you’?”
Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?: A Novel (Henry Holt and Co., June 19, 2012)
Today again I am hardly myself.
It happens over and over.
It is heaven-sent…
It flows through me…
burst from the tips of my fingers
somewhere deep in the words,
in the reckless seizure of spring.
Just yesterday I watched an ant crossing a path, through the
tumbled pine needles she toiled.
And I thought: she will never live another life but this one.
And I thought: if she lives her life with all her strength
is she not wonderful and wise?
And I continued this up the miraculous pyramid of everything
until I came to myself.
~ Mary Oliver, from Reckless Poem from New and Selected Poems, Volume Two (Beacon Press, Apr 1, 2006)
All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.
~ William Carlos Williams, “Winter Trees” in Sour Grapes: A Book of Poems (Andesite Press, August 9, 2015)
There are poems
that are never written,
that simply move across
the mind
like skywriting
on a still day:
slowly the first word
drifts west,
the last letters dissolve
on the tongue,
and what is left
is the pure blue
of insight, without cloud
or comfort.
~ Linda Pastan, “There are Poems” from Carnival Evening (W.W. Norton) ((via seemoreandmore)
In The Wave in the Mind, one of Le Guin’s many collections of essays, she wrote, ‘All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people.’ When I met Le Guin, I was in outer space, hovering in that darkness. Cast out from my homeworld, I spent my days orbiting a new world, afraid to land. She taught me a few things that I’ve never forgotten:
1. Not everyone who thinks they’re better than you actually is.
2. Speaking your mind is better than hiding your mind.
3. Trying to be an author is a very bad idea.
~ Alison Smith, HER LEFT HAND, THE DARKNESS (Granta 145: Ghosts | The Online Edition, Essays & Memoir 3rd January 2019)
We go on
Drifting on
Dreaming dreams
Telling lies
Generally wasting our time
Suddenly it’s too late
Time has come and can’t wait
There’s no more time
~ The Kinks, from Time Song (2018) This song was originally written and recorded for The Kinks’ 1973 Preservation Act 1 album, but it didn’t make the final cut. It was made available to the public for the first time in 2018 when it featured on the 50th Anniversary Edition of the band’s sixth album, The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society. (Source: Songfacts)