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Who You Are

These days, I don’t much prescribe to the idea that we all have inside us an authentic personality, that if you dug down deep enough you’d find a core of identity, cohesive and discrete. That’s what all the old idioms seem determined to make us believe: be yourself, stay true to you, everyone else is already taken, etc., etc. How does one do that, exactly? We are, after all, products of our environment, amalgamations of our parents, our friends, our communities, our cultures. We have patchwork identities, composed from the scraps of experience we’ve stumbled across as we’ve grown. Any foundations of identity such as those you were born with would, by the time you’re an adult, be hopelessly muddled with everything else. Where, then, do you draw the line between the world and the self? Who is you, and how do you be true to her if she’s constantly stealing from everyone else when you turn your back?

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There’s no god, there’s no anything. There’s just people in rooms trying to be happy.

Siobhan Roy, Succession (2018—) 

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Afterglow

The sun was setting somewhere I couldn’t see, smothered by layers of cloud. But its light was bouncing off their billowy forms and coming in through my window as a soft golden suffusion. It alighted upon my bookshelves, illuminated their dusty spines. Outside the whole sunless world was coated in that mythic afterglow, until it began to pour. I sat there and watched the light wash away. The most beautiful things are always the first to leave.

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And a world with fewer languages isn’t only a world with more limited means of communication. It’s also a world with fewer stories and folk tales, fewer hagiographies, fewer poems, myths, and recipes, fewer remedies, fewer memories.

Fennelly, Beth Ann. “Fruits We’ll Never Taste, Languages We’ll Never Hear: The Need for Needless Complexity”

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Eurydice, Carol Ann Duffy

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Glass, Irony & God, ‘The Glass Essay’ by Anne Carson

[ID: You remember too much / my mother said to me recently.  Why hole onto all that? And I said, / Where can I put it down?]

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Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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so it has come to my attention that buying 27 books at once is not how normal humans behave

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buying books and reading books are two separate obsessions

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— Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems (University of California Press, 1940)

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“There is so much stubborn hope in the human heart.”

— Albert Camus, from “Absurd Creation,” The Myth of Sisyphus. (Alfred A. Knopf,1995)

“A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.”

― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“We don’t get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don’t get to choose.”

― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Then the voice in my head said 

whether you love what you love 

or live in divided ceaseless revolt against it 

what you love is your fate” 

― Frank Bidart, 1984

“Not that I ever had a choice in the matter. If you want a thing—truly want it, want it so badly that you need it as you need air to breathe, then unless you die, you will have it. Why not? It has you. There is no escape. What a cruel and terrible thing escape would be if escape were possible.”

— Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents

“It was a mistake to keep this single knife in my heart so long, but it is my knife, and my heart, too”

— Richard Jackson, from ‘Basic Algebra’

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By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

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Claudia Dey, Trout Stanley (2001)

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What is erotic about reading (or writing) is the play of imagination called forth in the space between you and your object of knowledge.

Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (via antigonick)