The saddest part of the end of a relationship is the loss of the language that lovers build for themselves.
Simple touches and actions that are insignificant beyond their surface meanings to the casual observer, will to the toucher and the touched speak a silent volume of shared memory and experience.
Words that are simply verbs, adjectives or commonplace nouns to everyone else who hears them, can uplift the heart of the fluent. Or tear it right out of them.
This is the loss we lament last, after the desire to actually see our ex-lovers has long since ceased haunting the corners of our hearts.
We so painstakingly build a language only to watch it die from disuse after the Empire has fallen, and we mourn it until the foundations of a new civilization have been set atop the ruins.
I’ve been doing a lot of the reading lately that I’d always wanted to do in University but never had the time for. Widening out my reading has actually made it easier for me to narrow down and identify favourites. In pairs, apparently.
Favourite writers: Virginia Woolf and George Orwell.
Favourite novels: Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated.
Favourite poets: Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda.
And some other recent reads that have made an impact:
Jane Jacobs - The Death and Life of American Cities
Hannah Arendt - Eichmann in Jerusalem
Marcus Aurelius - Meditations
Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar
"Can anything be more idiotic than certain people who boast of their foresight? They keep themselves officiously preoccupied in order to improve their lives; they spend their lives in organizing their lives. They direct their purposes with an eye to the distant future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately."
— Seneca, “On the Shortness of Life”. This guy and I, we could have a whole discussion about RRSPs
"Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage. It is time now to realize the nature of the universe to which you belong, and of that controlling Power whose offspring you are; and to understand that your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again."
— Marcus Aurelius, Books 2 of his Meditations
"Have tossed out every decent [opportunity] I had to start all over again on the right foot. There were lots that were no good but [I] missed the good ones along with them. Refrained from gambling and accomplished nothing.
Had lots [of] good ideas to start something big, but the fear of failure had me well in hand.
So far I’ve [wasted] the best years of my life studying something that I’m afraid to engage in.
My ambition is just as most of us have— to become big and renown[ed]. But my inferior[ity] complex is heavier than my ambitions.
Lots of times I thought of writing a novel or poems but lack of education loomed across my day dreams, so it looks like I’ll stick to an average logger’s life and try to make the best of it."
— My Grandfather’s journal, Dec 1947, when he was 31. I couldn’t stop crying the first time I read this. A few years ago, he gave me his journals and photos from his bachelor days, and started telling me stories for hours about his life. His advice to me abruptly changed from “find a nice young man” to “go adventure; learn as much as you can, don’t settle down until you’re ready”.
He paid for several years of university for me, and I didn’t fully appreciate the gesture until I found this note at the end of one journal.
His short term memory is almost gone now; I wish I’d had the chance to tell him how much he’s influenced my overall philosophy on how to live life.
I’m not convinced that anyone can truly and absolutely know anything for certain, but… I believe I can FEEL that I do.
I can feel that I know a thing from the depths of my bones to the edges of my skin.
I know it so well that I will begin to imagine that my knowledge of a thing is what is really flowing through my veins, animating my body.
When I think about how deeply I can know something, I begin to think that this is what love is.
Love is knowing a thing with such absolute certainty that it can keep you alive.
"Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for."
—
—Ray Bradbury
My poor Tumblr died. I moved to the attic apartment of my dreams and decided not to get the internet, and it’s been kind of amazing. I don’t have a TV either, so instead of staring at a screen for hours, I’ve started writing more, drawing again, and working recent photographic work into both of the other things. I’ve also started catching up on reading, since I’ll be working full time at the bookstore starting September.
"The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies"
— Jonathan Franzen, “My Father’s Brain”
