E. B. White

Seneca, letter to his mother 4th c bce

I realized that your grief should not be intruded upon while it was fresh and agonizing, in case the consolations themselves should rouse and inflame it: for an illness too nothing is more harmful than premature treatment. So I was waiting until your grief of itself should lose its force and, being softened by time to endure remedies, it would allow itself to be touched and handled.

[…]

[Now] I shall offer to the mind all its sorrows, all its mourning garments: this will not be a gentle prescription for healing, but cautery and the knife.

Lawrence Weshler, letter to William Shawn after he solicited fiction [via Wondercab Mini]

...the part of my sensibility which I demonstrate in nonfiction makes fiction an impossible mode for me. That’s because for me the world is already filled to bursting with interconnections, interrelationships, consequences, and consequences of consequences. The world-as-it-is is overdetermined: the web of all those interrelationships is dense to the point of saturation. That’s what my reporting becomes about: taking any single knot and worrying out the threads, tracing the interconnections, following the mesh through into the wider, outlying mesh, establishing the proper analogies, ferreting out the false strands. If I were somehow to be forced to write a fiction about, say, a make-believe Caribbean island, <https://substack.com/redirect/568ed66d-b92c-45e4-8a5d-ac0187da5624?j=eyJ1IjoiN2dueTIifQ.kl4KzAsqc2VOgMgVHh0d0xHCdE2eDfTFP_FYh7mBzUc> I wouldn’t know where to put it, because the Caribbean as it is is already full—there’s no room in it for any fictional islands. Dropping one in there would provoke a tidal wave, and all other places would be swept away. I wouldn’t be able to invent a fictional New York housewife, because the city as it is is already overcrowded—there are no apartments available, there is no more room in the phone book. (If, by contrast, I were reporting on the life of an actual housewife, all the threads that make up her place in the city would become my subject, and I’d have no end of inspiration, no lack of room. Indeed, room—her specific space, the way the world makes room for her—would be my theme.)

Louise Gluck, Telemachus' Detachment

When I was a child looking at my parents' lives, you know what I thought? I thought heartbreaking. Now I think heartbreaking, but also i insane. Also very funny.

Tomas Transtromer’s “Sentry Duty,” Translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly [via Lawrence Weschler]

Task: to be where I am.
Even when I’m in this solemn and absurd
role: I am still the place
where creation does some work on itself.

…

 

Ursula K. Lee Guin, A Wizard of Earths [via @carsonellis]

"I am yours, by parentage and custom and by duty undertaken towards you. I am your wizard. But it is time you recalled that, though I am a servant, I am not your servant. When I am free to come back I will come back: till then farewell."

Ben Lerner, 10:04

The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.

 

Richard Feynman

Emily Dickinson, 686

They say that "Time assuages"—
Time never did assuage—
An actual suffering strengthens
As Sinews do, with age—

Quaker proverb

Proceed as the way opens.

Joan Didion quoting her therapist in Notes to John

Having to be right is like the Midas touch. You think it would be wonderful if everything you touched turned to gold, and then you find you've turned to gold yourself.

Barley Blair quoting ‘Goethe’, in John LeCarre - The Russia House

Some things are necessary evils. Some things are more evil than necessary.

Graeme Greene, The Quiet American

Sooner or later…One has to take sides if one is to remain human.

Gertrude Stein

It is not what France gave you but what it did not take from you that was important. 

Chesterton, Orthodoxy

The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea.

(Via Alan Jacobs)

Julia Ward Howe, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”

…in the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on.

Joan Didion, “Why I Became a Cop Hater” (reporting on Chicago 1968)

I began to distrust the baroque obfuscation of language common among the police, began to see it not as an amusing foible but as a quite purposeful barrier between the cop and the enemy. I watched cops caught in stupid lies. I started hearing a tone in police voices, a tone that made no distinction between the criminal and the noncriminal, between the Mafia narcotics dealer and the college boy with two sticks of marijuana in his glove compartment. 'Move on, sister,' the tone said, and 'We aren't running a hotel, lady.' (I was told that by the desk sergeant in a jail where I was trying to arrange bail for a boy who had just been arrested for possession of marijuana. 'We aren't running a hotel, lady,' and then: 'I can give him a message if I feel like giving him a message, not otherwise.') It was a tone calculated—whether by deliberation or reflex—to threaten, to harass, to humiliate, to bully. I read not long ago that the police call this tone, this stance, 'aggressive prevention.' Perhaps all they are preventing is the possibility of their own credibility.

Rebecca Solnit, One Long Year Later: It’s Not Over and We Haven’t Surrendered (Meditations in an Emergency)

The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything, and everything we can save is worth saving.

RAIZAN (来山) death poem in tanka form - 1716

Raizan has died
to pay for the mistake
of being born:
for this he blames no one,
and bears no grudge.  

Psychiatrist in Joan Didion, Notes to John

Don't make the mistake of telling her what to do, telling her what she should be doing. You can't teach by telling. Trying to teach by telling is very hard not to do. It seems counterintuitive. It seems to run against human nature. Which is to say it runs against the way we ourselves were taught. This is one of the hardest things to learn when you're being trained as a psychiatrist.

Frank O’Hara, Meditations in an Emergency

…I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

…