Be Busy. Busy Not Checking Messages. Busy Reading Those Books You Never Started Or Finished. Busy Having

I believe there's some truth to it.

“Reading can be hard, or at least it can present the sort of challenge that modern life is supposed to ease or optimize away. Reading is harder than streaming Netflix, watching a movie, listening to music, or playing video games. Hardness, on its own, is not a virtue. It does, however, matter. It matters to be a disciplined adult. It matters to sit still, to think, to escape the flotsam and be alone with yourself, with another world. It matters to grapple with language, theme, plot, and characterization. It matters that the conclusions aren’t simple, that literature—good literature—is murk. It’s the dark of the wilderness, a lighted match showing that, in fact, there is only more, a vastness you can only begin to comprehend. Reading teaches you that life is not an algorithm and that the certainty of your opinions, neatly sorted into a 2020s rubric, is very much unwarranted, with eternities stretching before and after you. Reading is meeting another consciousness that is not cable television and never will be, that exists at a complexity many lightyears beyond self-righteous pundit panels, the red versus blue, your new spin on the midterms. Reading is knowing those you would never know otherwise. It is, perhaps, the most human thing you can do.”

— You Should Read Books

LOVE AS VIOLENCE VS LOVE AS SOFTNESS

Ada Limon, The Good Fight // Mary Oliver, West Wind // Danez Smith, Bare // Sappho, Fragment 58.25-26 // Mitski, I Don’t Smoke // Ashe Vernon // Hozier, Cherry Wine // Shauna Barbosa, GPS // Richard Siken, Little Beast // Chen Chen, Summer [The sunflowers fall…] // Warsan Shire // Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

love as recognition

anna gavalda / friedrich nietzsche / clarice lispector / jandy nelson / rebecca perry / mhairi mcfarlane

Memories of another life, a life before loss, a life turned to memory long before death

-Memory

What is it with the October air,

reminds me of all the things bright and fair,

days are strange, sun, rain and mist,

I'm back to those houses not made of cement and bricks,

picking lemons, making wells of mud and houses of wet sand,

where the morning air was warm, burning feet, dunes and desert land,

making toys of clay, dolls of rugs, money of leaves, boats of paper,

tumbling down the sand dunes, running in the storms of sand filled air,

Limestone walls, a room just for water, an old well, pots of clay,

where birds and i shared drinks of cold water on a warm sunny day,

I do not have clothes stung with tiny starry thorns anymore,

the days full of wonder, hair full of sand, swings on tree branches are gone,

years are lost and I have wandered far from nest, memory turning to stone,

i do not sleep under the stars anymore, perhaps I've lost the idea of home.

- Prity

11-11-24

love is the fabric of the universe.

vladmir nabokov in a 1926 letter to his wife véra // la traviata, giuseppe verdi // the antennae galaxies in the midst of colliding, x // speak, memory, vladimir nabokov // heart and soul nebulae, x // interstellar (2014), dir. christopher nolan // divan i shams, rumi