neptoontheeight

[neptoontheeight]

« One of the surprising things about the porpoise is that his superior brain is unaccompanied by any type of manipulative organ. […] Human beings think of intelligence as geared to things. The hand and the tool are to us the unconscious symbols of our intellectual achievement. It is difficult for us to visualize another kind of lonely, almost disembodied intelligence floating in the wavering green fairyland of the sea—an intelligence possibly near or comparable to our own but without hands to build, to transmit knowledge by writing, or to alter by one hairsbreadth the planet’s surface.

Perhaps man has something to learn after all from fellow creatures without the ability to drive harpoons through living flesh, or poison with strontium the planetary winds. [Quoting Herman Melville] “[The porpoise’s] great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is declared in his pyramidical silence.” If man had sacrificed his hands for flukes, the moral might run, he would still be a philosopher, but there would have been taken from him the devastating power to wreak his thought upon the body of the world. Instead he would have lived and wandered, like the porpoise, homeless across currents and winds and oceans, intelligent, but forever the lonely and curious observer of unknown wreckage falling through the blue light of eternity. »

— Loren Eiseley, The Star Thrower

[neptoontheeight]

“How many years does it take to forget a minute?”

—

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the effort and time i put into trying to socialize is equal to the effort and time to read like a 500 page book in one day, which is why i dont socialize and stick to my fantasy worlds which are much more worth my effort and time. so sorry cant hang out.

[neptoontheeight]

“Nothing is so rare as to see misfortune fairly portrayed; the tendency is either to treat the unfortunate person as though catastrophe were his natural vocation, or to ignore the effects of misfortune on the soul, to assume, that is, that the soul can suffer and remain unmarked by it, can fail, in fact, to be recast in misfortune’s image.”

— Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” (trans. Mary McCarthy)

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One real benefit of reading I rarely hear anybody mention is how much more interesting life becomes when you read a lot. It depends what you’re reading, of course, but most (good) books will teach you something you didn’t already know, and even if you have to give the book back to the library, you get to take that much with you. A lot of people talk about things they wish they’d studied in school–I’ve done it, too–but it’s a nice consolation prize that you can always pick up a book and learn something new. And as that library in your brain collects more volumes, everything around you gains new resonances, new context, and new connections which make your lived experience richer. In quarantine alone I’ve read about religion and politics and history and evolution and computer science and astrophysics without even leaving my house and it’s already a more interesting world. 

[neptoontheeight]

Views from my run; it is so quiet in the early morning. Spend too much time thinking about the way this morning light warms through all these empty spaces, glitters in the river, makes my head uncluttered

[neptoontheeight]

Andre Dubus, “After Twenty Years”, Broken Vessels: Essays

[Text ID: “I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad. Only the privileged - those with homes and food and the luxury of time in a home - are touched, moved, sometimes changed by literature. For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy. What do stars look like on a clear cold winter night, when your children are hungry, are daily losing their very health; or when, alone, you look up from a heat grate? Of course in cities at night you can’t even see the stars.”]

[neptoontheeight]

“To you I give the moons of every single night.”

— Sara Shagufta (Pakistan, 1954 – 1984), from “How Solitary Is The Moon”, translated from Urdu by Sascha Aurora Akhtar

[neptoontheeight]

from Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women’s Poetry

[Text ID: “My lover rests near where the flowers are And on him lies the dew of my most tender kisses.”]

[neptoontheeight]

“No steps, no traces. You create a friendship between silence and your lips. You are truly alone with yourself now. You fall into it, light and free. You test your silence and fragility. You have the power now to ask it, are you who you are?”

— Adonis, tr. by Khaled Mattawa, from “Concerto for the Road to Dante’s Church”, Selected Poems

[neptoontheeight]

[neptoontheeight]

out of the blue

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by Yulya Lapteva

[neptoontheeight]

Don’t tell people your plans,

show them your results.

[neptoontheeight]

For a writer like José Donoso it must have been useful to forget fiction for a while and write down his thoughts without thinking much about readers. The writing of intimate diaries tends to be associated with getting things off one’s chest and it’s unfair, because of that, to ask for truth or accountability in these notebooks. That he wanted to make them public is another matter […] Should Donoso have kept those pages to himself, burned them, published them? I don’t know. I don’t really know what I think about this story. For the moment, Pilar Donoso’s book interests me much more than her father’s novels. I say it without irony: those of us who were born at the start of the dictatorship grew up searching for and telling the stories of our parents, and it took us too long to understand that we also had our own stories. Perhaps that’s why I find the image so beautiful: a woman reading her father’s notebooks and writing in the margins, finally, the notes for a story of her own.

Alejandro Zambra, from “Literature of the Children”, Not to Read (trans. Megan McDowell)

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Oh were you reading that part? Oh that’s too bad my paw is on it now, what are you gonna do about it?

[neptoontheeight]

why are dog lovers so hateful??? like you meet a cat lover and they’re like “oh i love dogs a lot too! i just prefer cats!” but dog lovers are always like “my ENTIRE FAMILY was MURDERED by a CAT, a cat STOLE MY GIRLFRIEND, BURNED MY HOUSE DOWN, TOOK MY JOB AND KEYED UP MY CAR"