“Memory commits you to the nuance; the fog.
If you act on memory you commit yourself on the basis of echoes: unpredictable, faint, fading even as they were generated.
No basis on which to inch out across your life, and yet all you have.”
—M. John Harrison
And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow,
stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so?
It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags.
And he puzzled and puzzled ’till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before.
What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store.
What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.
—Dr. Seuss
Merry Christmas to all.
On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star
would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons
equals the collective weight of every animal
on earth. Including the insects. Times three.
Six billion tons sounds impossible
until I consider how it is to swallow grief—
just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed
a neutron star. How dense it is,
how it carries inside it the memory of collapse.
How difficult it is to move then.
How impossible to believe that anything
could lift that weight.
There are many reasons to treat each other
with great tenderness. One is
the sheer miracle that we are here together
on a planet surrounded by dying stars.
One is that we cannot see what
anyone else has swallowed.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Isn’t Breaking
What does the sentence “If you eat this fruit you will die” mean for Eve who is in a place where there is no death?
—Hélène Cixous, Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kakfa, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva
Happy Halloween, I guess.
Each year is like putting a new coat over all the old ones.
Sometimes I reach into the pockets of my childhood and pull things out.
—Simon Van Booy, “Little Birds”
Happy birthday (to me, from me).
If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe.
Evelyn Waugh
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?
Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness.
Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
“And God,
please let the deer on the highway
get some kind of heaven.
Something with tall soft grass
and sweet reunion.”
Althea Davis
Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion.
Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
—Anne Rice
Happy eleventh birthday, La Pêche Fraîche!
“… Sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in …”
Jane Austen
