Felicity

“I’ve discovered the most horrible thing: by giving up who I am, I’m getting exactly what I want.” –Felicity

Embers

“‘…Do you also believe that what gives our lives their meaning is the passion that suddenly invades us heart, soul, and body, and burns in us forever, no matter what else happens in our lives?  And that if we have experienced this much, then perhaps we haven’t lived in vain?  Is passion so deep and terrible and magnificent and inhuman?  Is it indeed about desiring any one person, or is it about desiring desire itself?  That is the question.  Or perhaps, it is indeed about desiring a particular person, a single, mysterious other, once and for always, no matter whether that person is good or bad, and the intensity of our feelings bears no relation to that individual’s qualities or behavior?  I would like an answer, if you can…’”

Sandor Marai

Horror Vacui

“Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort.  Then he feels nullity, lonliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.” -Blaise Pascal

There’s nothing quite as awesome as finding something worth investing yourself in.  We are so good at being lazy and useless, and yet it only makes us miserable.  In my opinion? Not worth it.  Temporary pain (running, going to class, reading a book) leads to ultimate gain (being ok with yourself in a swimsuit, graduating, being a little smarter).

There is nothing so destructive as emptiness.  And filling it up with your PS2 does not count.

Shroud

“I ask what I have asked already: what did it benefit me to take on his identity?  It must be, simply, that it was not so much that I wanted to be him–although I did, I did want to be him–but that I wanted so much more not to be me.  That is to say, i desired to escape my own individuality, the hereness of my self, not the thereness of my world…Yet I have lived as him fo so long I can scarcely remember what it was like to be the one that I once was…I pause in uncertainty, losing my way in this welter of personal, impersonal, impersonating, pronouns.”

“If, as I believe, as I insist, there is no essential, singular self, what is it exactly I am supposed to have escaped by pretending to be [him]?”

“To be someone else is to be one thing, and one thing only.  I think of an actor in the ancient world…The crowd knows him but cannot remember his name…He has a mask, he has had it for years; it is his talisman…Increasingly, indeed, he thinks the mask is more like his face than his face is.  At the end of a performance when he takes it off he wonders if the other actors can see him at all, or if he is just a head with a blank front…”

John Banville.

There are times when our own words are simply not enough.  Finding the words of others  makes us feel less alone, reminds us we are not the only ones who struggle.  My words are jumbled, they have no coherent meaning.  They are a sporadic Scrabble game played with a dyslexic, a crossword puzzle in a foreign language.  Even I don’t know what I mean anymore.  I want a break from words, but they haunt me.  They follow me around, springing up in my head in the middle of the night, while I drive, in the shower; my words appear in others’ books, they spill into essays, show up on the sides of buildings and Coke cans.  They find me on sidewalks, crosswalks, overpasses, bridges, trains, parking lots, posters, textbooks, novels, films, stores.  They never leave.

No matter where I go, words find me.  And so I leave a breadcrumb trail of crumpled papers smeared with potentially incomprehensible haikus.

Someday, they will all come together and create something beautiful.  In this alone I have faith.

The Smallest Things

“But where would I go to, really?  Whatever plans I might have put in place, there was nowhere farther I could escape to beyond this tawny shore, last edge of what for me was the known world.”

“All my life I have lied.  I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie.  It was a way of living; lies are life’s almost-anagram.”

“How would one detect the encroachment of senility, when what is being attacked is the very faculty of detection itself?…probably I shall shuffle into senility all unaware…the once-sharp edges of my self are blurring.”

“The smallest things are always the surest warning, if one but heeded them.”

John Banville, Shroud

Tights Are Not Pants

Kelsey: I didn’t realize.
Blair: That tights are not pants?!?! Honestly!

Tights aren’t pants. Even Gossip Girl agrees.

How We Spend Our Days

“How we spend out days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

-Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

This is turning into a quote-ish kind of morning for me.

Namely, Character

“We are inclined to think that everything that happens is to be turned into useful teaching.  In actual fact, it is to be turned into something even better than teaching, namely, character.  The mountaintop is not meant to teach us anything, it is meant to make us something.”

-Oswald Chambers

Could I feel more called out by a dead author right now?

Vita Nova

Incipit vita nova.

Dante Alighieri

Thoreau, Walden

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived … I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms…” (Walden, 1854).

Smoke

“These are the words of the Quester…

‘Smoke, nothing but smoke.’  There’s nothing to anything–its all smoke.  What’s there to show for a lifetime of work, a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone?  One generation goes its way, the next one arrives, but nothing changes–its business as usual for old Planet Earth.  The Sun comes up and the sun goes down, then it does it again, and again–the same old round.  The wind blows south, the wind blows north.  Around and around and around it blows, blowing this way, then that–the whirling, erratic wind.  All the rivers flow into the sea, but the sea never fills up.  The rivers keep flowing to the same old place, and then start all over and do it again.  Everything’s boring, utterly boring–no one can find any meaning in it.  Boring to the eye, boring to the ear.  What was will be again, what happened will happen again.  There’s nothing new on this earth.  Year after year its the same old thing.  Does someone call out, ‘Hey, this is new’?  Don’t get excited–it’s the same old story.  Nobody remembers what happened yesterday.  And the things that will happen tomorrow? Nobody’ll remember them either.  Don’t count on being remembered….

Life’s a corkscrew that can’t be straightened.  A minus that won’t add up.”

Learn to Cultivate Peace

“Learn to cultivate peace. And you can do this by learning to turn a deaf ear to your own ambitious thoughts. Or haven’t you learned yet that the strivings of the human minds not only impair the health of your body, but also bring dryness to the soul. You can actually consume yourself in too much striving…Your peace and inner sweetness can be destroyed by a restless mind.” -François Fénelon

Currently, I struggle with an inability to relax. B can spend entire Sunday afternoons watching F1 on SPEED, stretched out on the couch with the dog, a quilt, and a beer. Meanwhile, I’m running around like something is on fire: doing dishes, laundry, vacuuming the bedroom, making endless lists of things I have to get done someday…

I envy his ability to chill.

And its not because he doesn’t have things to do; he’s busier than I am.

Its because I just can’t seem to let myself relax. I’m consumed by this idea that I have to do everything. That being busy will somehow make my life better, more significant, more fulfilled. That somehow, making long to-do lists is going to make me Superwoman, or at least a better person.

I’m beginning to figure out that it won’t.

That doing these things is actually getting me further away from where I want to be.  I want to be the kind of person who can enjoy the beautiful things in life: summer evenings, a beautiful sunrise, an afternoon in the park, quiet moments.

Those things don’t happen on lists.

What Does This Say About Us?

“When we are single and young we  naturally make friends and are often open to new friendships…But as we age, become busy, worry about finances, and raise kids, we tend to start shutting down relationally.  Sure, we care for people all day long, but it doesn’t mean we really care about them.  We too easily forget how we felt when we were strangers, starting over again.”

From “Wanting all the Right Things”, by Shirin Taber

No, really, what does this say about us?

Great Book Quotes

“Beware of the man of one book.”  -Thomas Aquinas

“A library is a hospital for the mind.” -Anonymous

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”  -Joseph Addison

“She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.”  -Louisa May Alcott

“When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life.”  -Christopher Morley

“To read, when one does so of one’s own free will, is to make a volitional statement, to cast a vote; it is to posit an elsewhere and set off toward it. And like any traveling, reading is at once a movement and a comment of sorts about the place one has left. To open a book voluntarily is at some level to remark the insufficiency either of one’s life or of one’s orientation toward it.” -Sven Birkerts

“He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter.  By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.”  -Barrow

“The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.” -Abraham Lincoln

“To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.” -Andre Gide

“The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade.” -Anthony Trollope

“The ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.”  -Malcom X

“We read to know we are not alone.” -C.S. Lewis

“No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.”  -Confucius

“The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of the past centuries.” -Descartes

“The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”  -Dr. Seuss, I Can Read with My Eyes Shut!

“This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.” -Elbert Hubbard

Jackanapes

Word a Day:

jackanapes (JAK-uh-nayps) noun

An impertinent conceited person.

Probably from Jack Napes, from “jack (man) of an ape”. This word was the nickname of William de la Pole (1396-1450), Duke of Suffolk, as his badge was a clog and chain, as might be tied to an ape.

Mark Twain once said, “When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.” While swearing is considered uncouth and vulgar, it has its place and purpose. It helps provide an emotional release and clears the system. Isn’t a verbal venting of emotions better than a physical manifestation?

You don’t have to rely on those worn-out four-letter terms to inflict rude remarks on the offending party. With careful selection of words, it’s possible to elevate insults to an art form. Why not use this week’s exquisite words for one of those times when nothing less will do?