I suspect that such forgettings occur for everyone, and they may be especially common in those who write or paint or compose, for creativity may require such forgettings, in order that one's memories and ideas can be born again and seen in new contexts and perspectives.
The trouble with opinion is that it instantly islands us in the stream of life, cutting off its subject — and us along with it — from the interconnected totality of deep truth.
3w ago
We live on the surface of a star, and we are made of the dust of stars. The atoms in our bodies were forged in the hearts of dying stars billions of years ago.
3w ago
We are always dying. From the moment we are born, we begin the process of dying. We do not know how long we shall live—how many years or months or days.
the history of how that history has been imagined, framed and written at different times by different people over the past 200 years is almost equally enthralling.
1mo ago
The task, then, is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody sees.
1mo ago
The poet only asks to get his head into the world, but the world always strikes back and prevents him from seeing anything.
I was trying to find the human side of history, and humans were often my best source. When I thought about Sacajawea in the Rockies, trying to keep her infant son alive, I thought about my own kids at that age—about my wife breastfeeding them, both parties always hungry, always thirsty.
2mo ago
The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. Every man is wise when attacked by a disease from which he is never likely to suffer.
2mo ago
The mind, once expanded by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.
During the pandemic, Australia was closed to the world, international and domestic borders closed for nearly two years. WITI gave me the opportunity to time travel all over the globe.
Why all the threadbare drama, the stale catastrophism of calling it broken? It still beats, doesn't it, still trembles at the sight of fog flowing through the forest like a slow dance song. It was only dislocated, lost its locus for a while, popped out of the socket of good sense.
Maybe it was the sudden sense of death dislodged, however temporarily, that made me look at the small, seasonal deaths around me with a feeling of kinship. Fallen leaves soften the path I walk on, but not for my sake. The leaves fall to feed the trees, to shelter the creatures who are essential to this forest in a way that I will never be.
How are things different now from the way they were in the golden age? The best way to answer that might be to imagine what someone from the golden age would notice if we brought him here in a time machine.
2mo ago
The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.
3mo ago
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. The fact that some of us look at the stars does not make us better than those who do not.
3mo ago
The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody sees.
3mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
