This is a little hard to define, but it’s a collection of everything that’s not quite a poem and not quite a piece of short fiction. The lengths vary quite significantly, and I haven’t found a way yet to make it easier to find what you want - I might switch to something like the poems page.
The hardest question in the world is something to do with quantum physics. The second hardest is, “How are you?’
Henry Mance, Financial Times
This is why people cry at the movies: because everybody’s doomed. No one in a movie can help themselves in any way. Their fate has already staked its claim on them from the moment they appear onscreen.
John Darnielle, Wolf in a White Van
Smallpox was
Wikipedia
It strikes me that engagement with one’s life, like any relationship, requires ongoing cultivation. It requires effort. The lesson, I think, isn’t that we need pack our days with new experiences, forcing ourselves to swim continually into unfamiliar waters. All the researchers I spoke with stressed the need for balance between the novel and the familiar. It’s that balance I lost, and, hopefully, am beginning to find again. It occurs to me that in every language I know, ‘to be’ is an irregular verb
Markham Heid, Financial Times
But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience.
David Hume
History is made by man. Old [Giambattista Vico] said that man can only fully understand what he has made; the corollary to that is, that what man has made he can understand: it will not, like the physical world, remain impervious to his desire to understand. So if we look at history and find in it huge stories, plots identical to the plots of myth and legend, populated by actual persons who however bear the symbols and even the names of gods and demons, we need be no more alarmed and suspicious than we would be on picking up a hammer, and finding its grip fit for our hand, and its head balanced for our striking. We are understanding what we have made, and its shape is ours; we have made history, we have made its street corners and the five-dollar bills we find on them; the laws that govern it are not the laws of nature, but they are the laws that govern us.
John Crowley, The Solitudes
It surprises me, how a small gesture can feel so very big. How sometimes you don’t realize the nervousness or sadness you were holding deep inside until the touch of someone you love lets it all out of you, like your entire body is exhaling. Lucy Keating, Dreamology
I’ll be all the poets, I’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written in all the strands, it will be to you.
Red, This Is How You Lose the Time War
As the Secretary General of the United Nations, an organisation of one hundred and forty seven member states who represent almost all of the human inhabitants of the planet Earth, I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet. We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship - to teach if we are called upon; to be taught, if we are fortunate. We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of this immense universe that surrounds us, and it is with humility and hope that we take this step.
Kurt Waldheim, UN Sec Gen, for the Voyager Golden Record
I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.
Sylvia Plath
I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.
Kafka
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.
Kafka
first you have to remember that the first disco ball was painstakingly put together by hand from nothing but an idea and lots of intricately cut glass and bandaids and then you have to think about the experience of being under a disco ball for the very first time, bathed in reflections of an era that has not yet come to pass, and finally you end up wondering what else there is around you that has yet to be unearthed by something with so much as a silly name
@bulkhummus
When Adam bit the apple he did it because he trusted Eve. Because he loved her. Adam bit into the apple because the woman he loved told him to, no matter what God said. No matter the rules of heaven. What’s heaven to a woman’s love anyway? What’s God to your wife? The first sins of humanity, were trusting others. Eve trusted a snake, Adam trusted Eve, and I trust you. Maybe that’s a sin, just like the first couple. Maybe everyone’s right about us and we’re sinners and we offend God. But like I said, what’s God to a woman’s love anyway? What has heaven got that I can’t find sitting next to you on a cool autumn morning?
@cowpokeprose
every august without fail is like i will give you some of the most beautiful golden summer moments of your life but you will be thinking about childhood and loss constantly. it will always be either 5pm or 2am
@solarflowers
In medio uero omnium residet Sol
Copernicus
I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
Keats
We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
I will love you forever, whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, I’ll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again…I’ll be looking for you Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we’ll cling together so tight that nothing and no one’ll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you…We’ll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams…And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won’t just be able to take one, they’ll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we’ll be joined so tight…
Will Parry, The Amber Spyglass
There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.
C. S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe
One of the disadvantages of almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one’s favourite writers. It gave one a curious feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one’s dressing-gown.
Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
This is surely why it is so captivating that the Hogwarts Express departs from King’s Cross. None of the other terminus stations in London is fit portal for some eternal adventure. St. Pancras’ neo-gothic is too much of this world; Waterloo is an ugly memorial; Victoria is a monstrosity; Paddington has plenty of charm, but it is the charm of the here and now, of taxi cabs and London rain; Marylebone is too quaint; Euston is a miserable dump, no hint of its former glory, and though the old great hall would have been a very fine setting for magical adventures, it was rather too period.
Henry Oliver, The Common Reader
The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it. White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise
Gandalf, Jolkien Rolkien Rolkien Tolkien
It is easier to be in love in a room with closed doors. To have the whole world in one room. One person. The universe condensed and intensified and burning, bright and alive and electric.
Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea
The world was collapsing, and the only thing that really mattered to me was that she was alive
Percy Jackson, The Last Olympian
It is comforting to know there are lighthouse keepers on rocky islands along the coast. Sometimes, when I have been for a walk after dark and see my house lighted up, looking so alive, I feel that my presence here is worth all the Hell.
May Sarton
Modern science says: The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future. From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.
Nikola Tesla
I hold this to be the highest task of bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation. Rainer Maria Rilke
A kitchen is the best—I mean the saddest—room for tears. A bedroom is too easy, a bathroom too private, a living room too formal. If someone falls to pieces in the kitchen, in the space of work and nourishment, they must be truly coming undone. The bright lights offer no comfort, only illuminate. The floor should be vinyl and cold.
Heather Christle, The Crying Book
Our babysitter Jess pointed out how insane it is that babies laugh before doing almost anything else. Before crawling, walking, talking, or the millions of other milestones they’ll have in their life, they can understand a good joke. Comedic timing, delivery, its all there already, from day one. Jess said, “maybe that - comedy - is what separates us from everyone else.”
Alex Dobrenko, BothAreTrue
Friends reported that apparently ‘everyone’ in NYC was taking [Ozempic] before their winter holidays. It’s that kind of drug: mandatory among the moneyed leisure classes.
Fiona Golfar, Financial Times
E pur si muove
(And yet it moves)
Galileo, defying the Church
The road to Hell is paved with reasonable responses to individual incentives.
Significant Digits
Choose someone at random. Accost them in the middle of the street. Grab them by the lapels and beg them to listen. Convince them that they are the heir to an enormous, stupendous, and utterly useless fortune—1,437 square kilometers of “land” in northern Svalbard, a dilapidated building in Bombay that was once an orphanage, a herd of alpacas in the Peruvian highlands, a collection of medieval grimoires and alchemical manuscripts of highly dubious authenticity. Later they will understand why you did this: so that for even one moment they might experience the fullness of being and infinitude of possibility lying before us in every moment and be driven by that experience to seek out a more intense mode of existence.
Roger’s Bacon Substack
I know that salt is one of the principal weapons in the armoury of evil “ultra-processed food” producers and should be stopped, but I also know the ultimate secret of restaurant cooking — the reason restaurant food tastes better than yours — has always been that they use more butter than you can believe and more salt than you’d dare.
Tim Hayward, Financial Times
O Piso’s eldest son, though accustomed to virtue,
By your father’s voice, and wise yourself, take this
Dictum to heart, the middling and just tolerable
Is only properly allowed in certain fields. A lawyer,
A mediocre pleader of causes, may fall short
Of Messalla’s eloquence, know less than Aulus
Cascellius, yet have value: but mediocrity
In poets, no man, god or bookseller will accept.
Horace, Ars Poetica
…imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom,—a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom,—is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyse vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for their imperfections. Accept this then for a universal law, that neither architecture nor any other noble work of man can be good unless it be imperfect.
John Ruskin
I couldn’t stop thinking about how hundreds of millions of dollars don’t make you interesting, certainly not nearly as interesting as an amateur turkey hunter in Florida. We’ve all over-indexed for bucks as a proxy for emotional and/or general intelligence (see: Musk, Andreessen, Thiel, Trump). Like starving medieval peasants, we’re still mapping greatness/brilliance/interestingness to wealth. The gilded dingdongs of the world all suffer from primate impulses like the rest of us. Beckham comes off as a mostly kind, physically talented, sort of lost and lonely kid. Most of Beckham’s stresses (not unlike many of ours) in life could have been mitigated by a little ego sublimation. Sometimes, even if you can marry the Spice Girl, you shouldn’t.
Roden 085
All Change Points, from Xerxes to the last presidential election, create worlds with clean, efficient Zeppelin traffic. Changing history may produce Zeppelins as an inevitable by-product, much as bombarding uranium produces gamma rays. Often, the quickest way to tell if you are in an Alternate History is to look up, rather than at a newspaper or encyclopaedia. From this premise, it is not outside the realm of Plausibility that our history between 1900 and 1936 was, in fact, an Alternate History. It would, at least, explain a lot.
Kenneth Hite, An Alternate-Historical Alphabet
There is something fascinating about the way perhaps the most famous non-Julia Roberts white woman in the world¹ chooses to present herself. I’ve seen the theory circulated online (and sometimes in the comment section of this newsletter) that Taylor Swift has to dress like a girl waiting to get picked up from Woodland Hills Mall because approachability is part of her brand. Beyoncé is the impenetrable, divine, musical savant; Ariana has the voice and the curious taste in partners.² Dua Lipa can’t dance but she’s so cool. Onstage at the Eras Tour, sitting at a piano, Taylor Swift talks about being lonely and covered in cat hair. (She is a billionaire.)
hunter harris
If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
Kafka
My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web.
Sylvia Plath
Where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind forever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought
alone.
William Wordsworth, The Prelude
it were comfort forever - just to look in your face, while you looked in mine
Emily Dickinson
I like Rooney’s books, and am excited when a new one comes out, and one of the many things I like about them is that almost every time two characters have sex – and it’s pretty often – they discuss contraception. Such conversations are realistic, even if they aren’t included in the sex scenes in many other books. It makes me trust her. And in not being hidden, these discussions quietly stake a claim. Until relatively recently, taking into account a woman’s desire not to have a child would have been utopian, as would a couple determining, with equal say, the consequences of sleeping together. Rooney’s novels are full of such moments, all the more radical for being unobtrusive. She has said that during her childhood in Castlebar, County Mayo, her parents would adjudicate squabbles using the Marxist adage: from each according to their ability and to each according to their needs. To a writer born in February 1991 to the manager of an arts centre and a telecom worker in the west of Ireland, barely a year after the Berlin Wall fell, communism was something a child could grasp. It was common sense. It was how you knew you were loved and would be cared for.
Joanna Biggs, Glimpses of Utopia, LRB
Jack Lemmon in
Jack Lemmon’s gravestone