30 June to 6 July 2024
quotes of the week
Sunday
I’m at the age where I appreciate a nice handrail. WomenAfter50.com
Monday
13. At a job interview at a university, three men sitting across from me at a table. On my cv it says that I am currently working on a book about the color blue. I have been saying this for years without writing a word. It is, perhaps, my way of making my life feel “in progress” rather than a sleeve of ash falling off a lit cigarette. One of the men asks, Why blue? People ask me this question often. I never know how to respond. 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, as quoted by Suleika Jaouad in the Isolation Journals. A good reminder. I loved this book.
Tuesday
I needed a landscape that I didn’t know by heart. I needed to examine and re-examine somewhere that would fascinate and teach me. I needed somewhere in which I could absorb myself and, I hoped, soak up some of the unsettledness in me.
Alys Fowler, Hidden Nature as quoted by
in the University of Self in a brilliant and excitingly inspiring post entitled “Beginning to Decipher & Articulate My Interpretations of Place: Placewriting Lyric Fragments viii – x”Wednesday
Beowulf is the embodiment of a flat character.
in “Introducing Beowulf: Achilles’ well-behaved, much less complicated spiritual brother” from the Substack, The Library of BabelThursday
Wrong night, wrong city, wrong movie, wrong ambulances caterwauling past and drowning out wrong dialogue of wrong Norma Desmond, what could be more wrong she’s the same age as me this tilted wreck with deliquescent chin, I turn it off, eat soup and read a novel.
Wrong Norma, by Anne Carson as quoted by
in Creating Cyclical Time on her Substack Stunning SentencesFriday
Why would anyone build a Clock inside a mountain with the hope that it will ring for 10,000 years?
Part of the answer: just so people will ask this question, and having asked it, prompt themselves to conjure with notions of generations and millennia. If you have a Clock ticking for 10,000 years what kinds of generational-scale questions and projects will it suggest? If a Clock can keep going for ten millennia, shouldn’t we make sure our civilization does as well? If The Clock keeps going after we are personally long dead, why not attempt other projects that require future generations to finish?
The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, “Are we being good ancestors?”
— Kevin Kelly of the Long Now project, which I heard about from Stephen Brockwell at the ottawa small press book fair after party at the Royal Oak on Wellington Street
Saturday
There's a surprisingly beautiful place in Austria - Green Lake. From August to April - it's a green park, in spring the water level in the lake rises sharply due to snow melt and glaciers in the mountains, so deep waters flood this picturesque area every year by 4-5 meters. Sometimes the water level reaches 8 meters, but visibility in transparent water remains up to 30 meters or more. It's at this moment that you need to be there to see with your own eyes the crystal clear fresh water of the lake and a fabulously beautiful underwater park. It's amazing to see comfortable benches, flower beds, bridges and tired paths underwater... from the We Love David Attenborough FB page
If you have inspiring and intriguing quotes to share, please reach out. I’d love to include them here.
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Image description: orange and yellow paint with lines and a raised surface.
Oh I too love Bluets :-) And I am so glad you love that quote from Alys Folwer too - it's a great book xxxx