Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after “semicolons,” and another one after “now.”
And another thing. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than get old. And he did. He shot himself. A short sentence. Anything rather than a long sentence, a life sentence. Death sentences are short and very, very manly. Life sentences aren’t. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old. And that brings up the real proof of what a mess I have made of being a man.
"
—
Ursula K. Le Guinon being a man – the finest, sharpest thing I’ve read in ages
The playlists I used to create monthly, I’ve retired to creating seasonally. And I use the term create loosely–I add songs I hear and like or songs I think of as they come to me. My monthly playlists captured brief, curated flashes of life– the spring break escapism March, the verdant panic of April, break ups in August, the chimney smoke and football cheers of October, alternating holiday happiness and melancholia. In the change of a season, there is more story, an arc. But sometimes less of an arc and more of a swelling, burst, and drip, or a detonation and its aftermath silence.
I’m posting Fall 16 now even though Spring arrives. Winter officially ends in a week, and what I realize listening back to Fall is even as I hear the songs that soundtracked a time of profound stress and imagined futures made and broken, each song makes me happy now. Maybe a season is time enough to appreciate my experiences as incredible.
"In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists."
— Eric Hoffer, via this month’s NatGeo. I hope I’m learned and a learner.
One of my favorite professors told me if I wanted to be a good psychologist, I should read novels and watch films. I took his advice (on top of 5 years of training). Here’s to hoping he was right.
"So I kiss him, and there is the great dark sea ahead, and above the sheaves of yellow stars, shoals of cold bright pieces of light, and the great wind, blowing always cold gulps and gusts of air, big and soft in the tree leaves, hushing, miracles are happening, and I, strange and elated with a new wonder, child-like in my sudden power, look with eyes large in love and amazement at this intent lovely face so earnest, so close to mine."
— The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, diary entry no. 142 for
“Friday - August 22″, 1952 (via h-o-r-n-g-r-y)
It’s been a while since something I read compelled me to share here. Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan Novels are the something. I have been completely captivated by these books, the informality of the writing but the depth of what’s conveyed,
and by the characters and living in their world. I highly recommend them.
Here the narrator has an unexpected dinner with a old friend she loved, a love that never came to fruition, while her current fiancé sits beside her. How painful, even years later, not having her old love is.
“We all got up. I didn’t know what to do, I uselessly sought his gaze, as a great sorrow filled my heart. End of the evening, missed opportunity, aborted desires. Out on the street I hoped that he would give me a phone number, an address. He merely shook my hand and wished me all the best. From that moment it seemed to me that each of his gestures was deliberately cutting me off. As a kind of farewell I gave him a half smile, waving my hand as if I were holding a pen. It was a plea, it meant: you know where I live, write to me, please. But he had already turned his back.”
End of the evening, missed opportunity, aborted desires. That’s one of those poetic short sentences I love, that holds whole worlds in it.
Ms. Dix: Fear? Oh, don’t do that. The dark menace of the future makes cowards of us all. And the past is a thing each of us must overcome, in her own way. Is that not so, my dear Baroness?
Mary: Have I disappointed you?
Ms. Dix: Have you disappointed yourself?
Mary: It has not been as I expected.
Ms. Dix: Oh, it never is. But we need places of healing and mercy, now more than ever, so you must fight through it. The hardship, the resistance, the futility. There is nothing here without you.
"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air."
"Oh! Come what may, sooner or later, in six months, ten years, they will be together, will be lovers, because Fate ordains it, because they were born for each other."
