It's been a while, and I'm sorry it's the same day as #pubski, but I was stopped in my tracks by a delicious Proust quote:
- Pleasure […] is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative film; we develop it later, when we are at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner darkroom, the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people.
I wish I had the original French, mais ce n'est pas possible.
I read the quote in The Year of Reading Proust by Phyllis Rose. This is the second book I am reading about reading Proust. I enjoyed the first one very much, more than this one. Reading Proust himself might happen eventually.
I like this quote because I love solitude and don't spend enough time in my inner darkroom. I've been somewhat obsessed with solitude since ages. In graduate school I wrote a paper called, "Solitude vs Society in the Works of Dickenson and Thoreau." Weirdly, in my earliest teenage journals, I wrote this: "I want a man who will leave me alone."
Meanwhile, OftenBen flagamuffin wasoxygen and @everyoneelse@ - no more shoutouts but follow the tag!
Dans l'Internet, tout est possible.I wish I had the original French, mais ce n'est pas possible.
Pour le plaisir, je ne le connus naturellement qu'un peu plus tard, quand, rentré à l'hôtel, resté seul, je fus redevenu moi-même. Il en est des plaisirs comme des photographies. Ce qu'on prend en présence de l'être aimé n'est qu'un cliché négatif, on le développe plus tard, une fois chez soi, quand on a retrouvé à sa disposition cette chambre noire intérieure dont l'entrée est « condamnée » tant qu'on voit du monde.
- Stephen King, "11/22/63"Although emotionally delicate and eminently bruisable, teenagers are short on empathy. That comes later in life, if it comes at all.
lil! You must be joking. I just finished Alain de Botton's Proust book last night. I loved it. I can't believe this thread popped up. I'm not around my copy, but the whole book is quotable. I had something saved, by de Botton but also maybe by Proust:There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or even lived in a way which was so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. But he shouldn’t regret this entirely, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man — so far as any of us can be wise — unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be reached. I know there are young people . . . whose teachers have instilled in them a nobility of mind and moral refinement from the very beginning of their schooldays. They perhaps have nothing to retract when they look back upon their lives; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake for us, an effort which no one can spare us.
-The Martian The whole damn book is like this. Not so much 'that's what she said' but just a complete disregard for anything approaching a professional demeanor from the protagonist. I really hope that the movie doesn't neuter Watney too much, he's written as a wise ass, and that's a large part of what makes the book so enjoyable, especially with the [REDACTED]"[11:49] JPL: What we can see of your planned cut looks good. We’re assuming the other side is identical. You’re cleared to start drilling. [12:07] Watney: That’s what she said. [12:25] JPL: Seriously, Mark? Seriously?”
veen's quote made me sad, because I strive to be a deliberate person. Whatever I'm going to do, I'll do on purpose and with the best knowledge of my 'why.' But then your fortune cookie's wisdom made deliberate intention something to be handled gently, leaving the future open to possibilities outside of those initial conditions in which a choice or plan of action is made.
There is a difference between deliberation and control. Control is the ability to change - deliberation comes from the desire to change. If you have some control over a situation, you can deliberately go in the preferred direction. You can be a deliberate person but not have control of the situation. Or have control but no deliberation. It reminds me of the Serenity Prayer: accept what you cannot change, have the courage to change what you can and have the wisdom to know the difference. What I think she is trying to say is that regardless of whether you can, you shouldn't try to control everything. That doesn't mean you can't be deliberate - just leave some room for the unexpected, for change.
—of the theatre, Terry Pratchett, Wyrd SistersInside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from—hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in.
-- Thich Nhat HahnIt is of no use to sit in a peaceful forest if our mind is lost in the city. When we live with a child or a friend, their freshness and warmth can relax us. But if our heart is not with them, their precious presence is neglected, and they no longer exist.
This doesn't count, but I encountered a beautiful quote in the finale to the US version of the British TV series Life on Mars:It goes like this, Spaceman. We live on a rock, there ain't no rhyme, there ain't no reason. We live on a rock, just one of many. Hurling around in some big cosmic jambalaya. Now you wanna get question-y, that's your prerogative. My ma took me to a loud church every Sunday. She squeezed her eyes shut, she pressed her rosary beads to her lips and she prayed for good things for those she loved. But, cancer took two of her sisters. Her husband couldn't make a move without a belly full of gin, her youngest son turned to a life of crime, and her oldest, me, is a nasty son of a bitch who can't get out of third gear without a snarl. So, who was she talking to every Sunday and why wasn't he answering? I will tell you why, because we live on a rock, just one of many. There ain't no answers! There's just this! And all you can really hope to do is to find a couple of people who make the seventy or eighty odd years we get to live on this sweet swinging sphere remotely tolerable.
soul, overflowing with rapture, yearned for freedom, space, openness. The vault of heaven, full of soft, shining stars, stretched vast and fathomless above him. The Milky Way ran in two pale streams from the zenith to the horizon. The fresh, motionless, still night enfolded the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the cathedral gleamed out against the sapphire sky. The gorgeous autumn flowers, in the beds round the house, were slumbering till morning. The silence of earth seemed to melt into the silence of the heavens. The mystery of earth was one with the mystery of the stars.... Dostoyevsky must have been on a seizure high when writing that. I have re-read that passage monthly for more than two decades. It becomes more vivid and sublime with every time that I re-read that novel. Zossima is a slippery character; proto-Yoda-ish. Alyosha's earth, water and firmament has solidified into our Christ-like figure reborn into our world as Zossima passes. Not continuing to study Russian is a minor regret. I would love to embrace that passage in русский.He did not stop on the steps either, but went quickly down; his
Elmore Leonard, Freaky DeakyIt doesn't have to make sense, it just has to sound like it does.
I've been making my way through Makers of Modern Thought, the copy I own I picked up used from a discard pile at my universities library. Chance would have it that this exact copy was once owned by the Professor Emeritus of the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music at one point in time. - Francis Bacon."But howsoever the works of wisdom are among human things the most excellent, yet they too have their periods and closes. For so it is that after kingdoms and commonwealths have flourished for a time, there arise perturbations and seditions and wars; amid the disturbances of which, first the laws are put to silence, and then men return to the depraved conditions of their nature, and desolation is seen in the fields and cities. And if such troubles last, it is not long before letters also and philosophy are so torn in pieces that no traces of them can be found but a few fragments, scattered here and there like planks from a shipwreck; and then a season of barbarism sets in, the water of Helicon being sunk under the ground, until, according to the appointed vicissitude of things, they break out and issue forth again, perhaps among other nations and not in the places where they were before."