Notes
My Name Is Red
Erdağ M. Göknar"Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness."
"... if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home."
"Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight."
"... the world itself is ecstasy to those who truly see."
"... beauty is the eye discovering in our world what the mind already knows."
"The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion."
"To paint is to remember."Nature's Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard
Douglas W. Tallamy"We must now act collectively to put our ecosystems back together again ... rather than acting as if we were independent of nature, we need to behave a little more reverently or respectfully toward nature, as if we were the product and beneficiary of a vibrant natural world, rather than its master."
The Möbius Book
Catherine Lacey"Hope is visible in the objects of our homes. Identities and plans rest dormant in a stack of books. The kitchen pantry reassures us our future nourishment. A toolbox is the confidence we can fix what will break. Little notes to self. Little notes of self. The secret language of things we use to fold life into time, time into life."
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"Without God, what was a body? Just a place to wait."
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"Fiction is a record of what has never happened and yet absolutely happened, and those of us who read it regularly have been changed and challenged and broken down a thousand times over by those nothings, changed by people who ever existing doing things that no no one quite did, changed by characters that don't entirely exist and the feelings and thoughts that never exactly passed through them."
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"I'm not sure if someone who chooses to suffer or is attached to his pain can ever be soothed away from it, and maybe any effort to comfort such a person is actually an effort to change them and therefore not a comfort at all, but rather a bid to shape them into the person you want them to be."The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts
Karen Armstrong"...we all - scientists as well as mystics - know only representations of reality, not reality itself. We deal with the world as it appears to us, not as it intrinsically is, so some of our interpretations may be more accurate than others."
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"Every scriptural canon has within it texts which, read literally, can be taken to endorse narrow particularism, suspicion of strangers, and intolerance toward those who believe differently than we do. Each also has within it sources that emphasize kinship with the stranger, empathy with the outsider, the courage that leads people to extend a hand across boundaries of estrangement or hostility. The choice is ours. Will the generous texts of our tradition serve as interpretive keys to the rest, or will the abrasive passages determine our ideas of what we are and what we are called on to do?" - Johnathan Sacks
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"The art of scripture was designed to effect radical change change in those who studied it, not to give divine sanction to their own inescapably limited views"Pew
Catherine Lacey"I shut my eyes and imagined a life in which only our thoughts and intentions could be seen, where our bodies were not flesh but something else, something that was more than all this skin, this weight."
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"Why did living feel so invisibly brief and unbearably long at once?"
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"When someone says they heard something you did not hear, and they know you did not hear it, you cannot tell them they did not hear what they believe they heard. They have heard their desire to hear something, and desire always speaks the loudest. It is the loudest and most confounding emotion - wanting."Book of Ecclesiastes - Alabaster Bible
Alabaster Co."Those who love money will never have enough. How meaningless to think that wealth brings true happiness"
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
John Burgoyne"Why then have we permitted the dominance of economic systems that commoditize everything? That create scarcity instead of abundance, that promote accumulation rather than sharing. We've surrendered our values to an economic system that actively harms what we love ... There is no room in these equations for the economic value of clean air and carbon sequestration and the ineffable riches of a forest filled with birdsong."
Biography of X
Catherine Lacey"Some days it seems she is only away in the next room, and when I go to that room she has fled to another room, and when I reach that one she is is in yet another...Even now, with all these years gone and all these stories stacked up irrevocably against her, I keep hearing her footsteps come steadily down the stairs, and I swear some afternoons I can hear her taking off her boots at the back door and padding up the hallway after an afternoon hike. In anger, in longing, in both, despite myself, I strain to hear those steps."
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"...a person always exceeds and resists the limits of a story about them, and no matter how widely we set the boundaries, their subjectivity spills over, drips at the edges, then rushes out completely."
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"How closely our lives drift past other lives; how narrowly we become ourselves and not some adjacent other, someone both near at hand and much too far away."The Book of Tea
Kakuzō Okakura"The outsider may indeed wonder at this seeming much ado about nothing ... but when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup."
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"A special contribution of Zen to Eastern thought was its recognition of the mundane as of equal importance with the spiritual. It held that in the great relation of things there was no distinction of small and great, an atom possessing equal possibilities with the universe"
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"At the magic touch of the beautiful the secret chords of our being are awakened, we vibrate and thrill in response to its call. Mind speaks to mind. We listen to the unspoken, we gaze upon the unseen. The master calls forth notes we know not of. Memories long forgotten all come back to us with a new significance. Hopes stifled by fear, yearnings that we dare not recognise, stand forth in new glory. Our mind is the canvas on which the artists lay their colour; their pigments are our emotions; their chiaroscuro the light of joy, the shadow of sadness. The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece."Passing
Brit Bennett"Chicago. August. A brilliant day, hot, with a brutal staring sun pouring down rays that were like molten rain. A day on which the very outlines of the buildings shuddered as if in protest at the heat. Quivering lines sprang up from baked pavements and wriggled along the shining car tracks. The automobiles parked at the curve were a dancing blaze, and the glass of the shopwindows threw out a blinding radiance. Sharp particles of dust rose from the burning sidewalks, stinging the seared or dripping skins of wilting pedestrians. What small breeze there was seemed like the breath of a flame fanned by a small bellows."
A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album
Elvin Jones"... [music] is a reflection of the universe, like having life in miniature."
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"... your humanity is your instrument."
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"He always showed appreciation for what was not always just about himself, his story, but he liked hearing other people's expression, and how you would interpret this idea, how do you respond to these chords. I thought it made him even greater, because truthfully, he has never criticized any musician, no matter what his field was."The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt"When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a flickering sun-struck instant that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature - fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place."
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"Strange, I thought ... how a few hours could change everything - or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed."
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"For humans - trapped in biology - there was no mercy... Time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing - to break bonds stronger than the temporal - was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair."
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...beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful."Greek Lessons
Deborah Smith, Emily Yae Won"This morning, recalling once more this slim green book, I fetched it from my suitcase in the storeroom. Turning the pages, I discovered a note written in a rough hand. Scribbled directly below a sentence by Borges, The world is an illusion, and living is dreaming, it read: How is that dream so vivid? How does blood flow and hot tears gush forth?"
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"There is, inevitably, something tenuous and unsatisfactory in the way the logical demonstrations works, sifting all of humankind's sufferings and regrets, attachments, sadness, and weaknesses through the loose net of truth and falsity to obtain a handful of premises like a handful of gold dust. Boldly casting fallacies aside and proceeding along the narrow balance beam one step at a time, we see silence rippling like a black body of water past the net of clear, coherent questions we've asked and answered ourselves. And still we go on asking and answering - even as our eyes remain immersed in the silence, in the menacing blue quiet that is constantly rising, like the black water."Human Acts
Deborah Smith"Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn't be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were were humans made of glass."
Speaking of Faith
Krista Tippett"Together we find illuminating and edifying words and send them out to embolden work of clarifying, of healing. We speak because we have questions, not just answers, and our questions cleanse our answers and enliven our world."
Ignorance
Milan Kundera"...despite all his amazing rockets, man will never progress very far into the universe. The brevity of his life makes the sky a dark lid against which he will forever crack his head, to fall back onto earth, where everything alive eats and can be eaten.
Misery and pride. 'On horseback, death and a peacock.' She was standing at the window, gazing at the sky. A starless sky, a dark lid."Simone
Eduardo Lalo"Writing. What other choice do I have in this world, where so many things are forever beyond my reach? But I'm still here, alive and irrepressible, and it doesn't matter if I've been condemned to corners, to cupboards to nothingness."
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"Another Sunday morning. The quiet street, a few kids shouting, a brief gust of wind swirling leaves down the sidewalk. The restless day of rest. Blessed are the birds that sing today like any other day - that is, without hope"
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My enjoyment of this book was greatly enhanced by reading it on a rooftop in San Juan, with the warm January air rustling the pages and making the story come even more alive.The Kingdom of This World
Harriet de Onís“Now he understood that a man never knows for whom he suffers and hopes. He suffers and hopes and toils for people he will never know, and who, in turn, will suffer and hope and toil for others who will not be happy either, for man always seeks a happiness far beyond that which is meted out to him. But man's greatness consists in the very fact of wanting to be better than he is. In laying duties upon himself. In the Kingdom of Heaven there is no grandeur to be won, inasmuch as there all is an established hierarchy, the unknown is revealed, existence is infinite, there is no possibility of sacrifice, all is rest and joy. For this reason, bowed down by suffering and duties, beautiful in the midst of his misery, capable of loving in the face of afflictions and trials, man finds his greatness, his fullest measure, only in the Kingdom of this World.”
Island of a Thousand Mirrors
Nayomi Munaweera"And always, always, the ever-churning sea, returning on itself, wiping away every footprint, These are the things I am saying good-bye to. I turn my head from the window as fear and liberation beat in equal measures through my bloodstream."
Martyr!
Kaveh Akbar“For all our advances in science—chickens that can go from egg to harvest in a month, planes to cross the world, missiles to shoot them down—we’ve always held the same obnoxious, rotten souls. Souls that have festered for millennia while science grew. How unfair, this copper delivery. How unfair, this life. My wounds are so much deeper than yours. The arrogance of victimhood. Self-pity. Suffocating.
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What was there to complain about? A murdered wife? A sore back? The wrong grade copper? Living happened till it didn’t. There was no choice in it. To say no to a new day would be unthinkable. So each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.”Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War
Viet Thanh Nguyen"Identifying with the human and denying one's inhumanity, and the inhumanity of one's own, is the ultimate kind of identity politics. It circulates through nationalism, capitalism, and racism, as well as through the humanities."
"...Kundera ... in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The laughter of angels, he says, is the sound of those in power. But should one always be aligned with the angels? Rather than just believe that devils are fallen angels, might it not be the case that angels are triumphant devils?"
"Is there anything more asymmetrical than air war waged against those without an air force, or a people forced to make a living by selling the fragments of the bombs to those who bombed them?"
"Culture, as Edward Said explains, is inseparable from imperialism, which can be read as humanity being inseparable from inhumanity."Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification
Rae Langton"'What particularly signalizes the position of woman', said Simone de Beauvoir, 'is that she - a free and autonomous being like all human creatures - nevertheless finds herself in a world where men ... propose to stabilize her as an object.' This bears on the situation of woman, and of man. In the company of a creature 'stabilized as an object', she said, 'man remains alone'."
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"If objectivity is about how the mind conforms to the world, objectification is about the opposite: objectification is, roughly, about some of the ways in which the world conforms to the mind. Objectification is a process in which the social world comes to be shaped by perception, desire, and belief: a process in which woman, for example, are made objects because of men's perceptions and desires and beliefs."
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"If one is to avoid the solipsistic worlds, some of of the beings with whom one interacts must be people (not things); and one must treat them as people (not as things)."
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"'...Luddite? No, I don't want to smash the machines but neither do I want the machines to smash me'"The Committed (The Sympathizer, #2)
Viet Thanh Nguyen"The danger with worshiping human beings, of course, is that eventually they reveal their flawed humanity, at which point the believer has no choice but to kill the fallen idols or die trying."
The Hour of the Star
Giovanni Pontiero"Yes, my strength is in solitude. I'm not afraid of pouring rains or great gusts of wind, for I too am the darkness of the night"
A Theory of Harmony (SUNY Series in Cultural Perspectives)
Ernst Levy"Harmonic theory is about harmonic norms."
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"A glissando is a pitch motion, a continual becoming. A tone, however, is a being, an individual."
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"Pitch change may first be considered a continuum. The howling of a siren, the glissando on a string, are examples embodying that concept. Now, the human mind is so structured that it apprehends the continuum by starting from discrete quantities, and not vice-versa. The development of mathematics offers a case in point. We see it starting from units (integers) and slowly making its way towards the continuum (calculus). If we state 'There exists an infinity of tones', we have already separated the continuum into discrete quantities."
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"Music ... is not primarily 'something that happens in the air'. It is something that happens in the human soul on the basis of a response to universal norms expressed in the tone structure."The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer, #1)
Viet Thanh Nguyen“Some animals could see in the dark, but it was only humans who deliberately sought out every possible route into the darkness of our own interiors.”
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Walter Benjamin"All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war."
The Raft is Not the Shore: Conversations toward a Buddhist/Christian Awareness
Daniel Berrigan“I think that life always is ambiguous. This we accept, the human situation being murky and conditioned by the past. But what we look for, as Camus says, is at least a world in which murder will not be legitimate. We don't look for a world in which murder will not occur, that seems unrealistic. But we don't want murder to be looked upon as virtuous and legitimate. Maybe that's a minimal definition of the kind of change we work for.”
The Love Poems of Rumi
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi"In the silence of love you will find the spark of life"
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Philip Gabriel“One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.”
Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”