From Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan (p.319):
“Anybody who has traveled this far on a fool’s errand,” said Salo, “has no choice but to uphold the honor of fools by completing the errand.”
From Men I Trust1:
“To be ours
Like the trees on our shores
All tweezed
The cliffs eat away at our knees”
It is fascinating how good poetry can somehow arrange common words to evoke a kind of instantaneous phenomenological experience that one can’t easily articulate with words but feel (understand?) intuitively; like a beam of warm sunlight rushing through a small gap between clouds in an overcast day.
From their 2021 album entitled “Untourable Album,” a newer live version posted on YouTube last night.
From Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation (p.82):
“When I began my first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, I knew I had no choice but to write about having nothing to write about.”
First things first: I have no delusion ambition to write a novel.
I want to write more because it’s becoming more and more clear to me that the only way I can get in dialogue with my own thoughts is to put them somewhere tangible 1.
One of the better photography books I read (saw?) this year was Domestic Landscapes by Bert Teunissen. It is such an amazing photography project because each photo puts a person in the center and tells their story through the space they lived in for many, many years. As I was seeing the photos, I kept remembering faded images of the house I grew up in, the houses of the relatives I visited, and the house my grandparents lived in when I visited there the summer after the first grade.
irf stands for “innumerable random formations.”
I came across this phrase in Stephen Greenblatt’s book Swerve, and it immediately felt like a good metaphor for the way my mind races from one unfinished thought to another.
I decided to start this blog because I realized that if I never pause and write down my thoughts, I never actually process them. I never engage with them. I don’t even remember most of them.