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“The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end - you don't come to an achievement, you don't come to a conclusion. It is an endless river.”
―
Monday, November 01, 2021
Clarity
The Whole
“You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.”
―
Henry David Thoreau: All the light of November may be called an afterglow.
On Nov. 10, 1858, Henry David Thoreau wrote the following observation about his daily walk in his journal,
I look out westward across Fair Haven Pond. The warmer colors are now rare. A cool and silvery light is the prevailing one; dark-blue or slate-colored clouds in the west, and the sun going down in them. All the light of November may be called an afterglow.
Aphides on alder.
Sap still flows in scarlet oak.
Returned by Spanish Brook Path. Notice the glaucous white bloom on the thimble-berry of late, as there are fewer things to notice. So many objects are white or light, preparing us for winter.
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”
―
Vulnerable
“Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.”
― Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
Newspapers
“Some newspaper stories can be presented in entertaining ways; they can make you laugh; they can make you weep. But they are not charged with providing exaltation or fantasy. In the most entertained nation in the history of the world, newspapers exist to provide the citizenry with truth. Sometimes the truth can have a moral point. Sometimes the truth is painful. Sometimes the truth is banal. But it has to be true. It must have a granitelike foundation in fact. The mere stacking of facts is not, of course, enough. The facts must be organized into a coherent whole. They must tell a story. And the great story usually tells us something larger than the mere facts, something about what novelists and philosophers have called, perhaps too grandly, the human condition.”
― News Is a Verb
Some Journeys
“The boy admonished himself for wanting everything to be a story. And now realized that some journeys were not stories. On some journeys, nothing really happened. You just kept taking steps.”
― Forever
We have to honor that
“My father had a job in the factory across the way, and because he'd lost his leg, he had a stump... and in the summer... he'd work on this assembly line 8 hours a day and he was home at night. And I heard him weeping in the dark around 1 o'clock in the morning and I knew that no matter what I ever did ... that I had to honor that pain. I think that's what the children of immigrants do, all of us. We know what they gave up. They gave up their countries. In some cases they gave up their languages. They worked at the lousiest, rottenest jobs in order to put food on our table. We have to honor that, for the rest of our lives.”
―
The Painting was Food
“The painting was food. He wanted to caress it, hold it in his hands, lick its glazed surface, plunge into it, dive into the Florentine light. Years vanished, decades were erased, and he was again the boy who had come here to the feast of art.”
― North River
Unknowable
“In the end, the only thing the true New Yorker knows about New York is that it is unknowable.”
― Piecework: Writings on Men & Women, Fools and Heroes, Lost Cities, Vanished Calamities and How the Weather Was
Newspapers
“Quite simply, I love newspapers and the men and women who make them. Newspapers have given me a full, rich life. They have provided me with a ringside seat at some of the most extraordinary events in my time on the planet. They have been my university. They have helped feed, house and educate my children. I want them to go on and on and on.”
― News Is a Verb
Words
“Maybe words, like potions, were also capable of magic.”
― A Drinking Life
“Words are loaded pistols.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
Love
"I don't know what that means. To truly live."
"To find work that you love, and work harder than other men. To learn the languages of the earth, and love the sounds of the words and the things they describe. To love food and music and drink. Fully love them. To love weather, and storms, and the smell of rain. To love heat. To love cold. To love sleep and dreams. To love the newness of each day."
― Forever
The Nap
The replenishing thing that comes with a nap - you end up with two mornings in a day.
There is more refreshment and stimulation in a nap, even of the briefest, than in all the alcohol ever distilled.
Barry Lopez
The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If the stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other’s memory.
BARRY LOPEZ
O. Henry
Yes, I get dry spells. Sometimes I can't turn out a thing for three months. When one of those spells comes on I quit trying to work and go out and see something of life. You can't write a story that's got any life in it by sitting at a writing table and thinking. You've got to get out into the streets, into the crowds, talk with people, and feel the rush and throb of real life—that's the stimulant for a story writer.
O. HENRY
turkey in the oven
So I said to her, "OK, so this is what you do. Think of a turkey as, like, a large chicken. You're going to cook it the same way you cook a chicken, just for a little longer." I told her exactly how to make it. And she put the turkey in the oven, and she said to her new husband, "Let's go for a walk. It's going to be an hour, and then I'll come back and baste it." And she came back and couldn't open the oven door. And it turns out, she had set the oven on “clean,” not on the temperature I told her to set it on. So her husband had to literally unscrew the oven door to get the turkey out. And I was like, "What did you do?" And she said, "Well, I served it." She said, "It was very clean!" -Ina Garten
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