Reading requires sitting alone by yourself in a quiet room and, I have friends, intelligent friends, who don’t like to read because they get, it’s not just bored, there’s an almost dread that comes up, I think, here, about having to be bored, about having to be quiet …. when you walk into most public spaces in America, it isn’t quiet anymore, they pipe music through. It seems significant that we don’t want things to be quiet, ever, anymore…. particularly now, in the computer and internet culture, everything is so fast, and the faster things go, we feed that part of ourselves but don’t feed the part of ourselves that likes quiet, that can live in quiet…
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
If someone ever tells you a certain song is important to them you should turn it up and lay on your bed and close your eyes and really listen to it even if its 10 minutes long because at the end you will know that person much better I think
Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.
… while skepticism and lunacy are from opposite ends of the mind.
~ü
Lunacy and faith are inseparable.
~ü
The barriers that obscure give us an opportunity to fill in the details.
~ü
[Images: Marek Chaloupka]
In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.
A bird calls from a tree. It is late evening in the summer. I remember the woods behind my childhood home. The sun is below the horizon. Someone is watching prime-time television. It’s time to come inside; it’s getting dark.
~ü