"If death is one mystery, then life is surely a greater one. We can only feel awe for a mystery that is both what we are, and what surpasses our understanding."
Jonathan Schell (via saturnrising)
Things and Stuff . Curated collections of themed words and images.
-
"I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand different matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair-cut and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered."
Jeffrey Eugenides (via vaporeuse)
(via libraryland)
-
A Rune, Interminable
Low above the moss
a sprig of scarlet berries
soon eaten or blackened
tells time.
Go to a wedding
as to a funeral:
bury the loss.
Go to a funeral
as to a wedding:
marry the loss.
Go to a coming
as to a going:
unhurrying.
Time is winter-green.
Seeds keep time.
Time, so kept, carries us
across to no-time where
no time is lost.
-
View high resolution
“That lunch hour, which lasts not one hour but two or even three, is a very important feature of French culture. It gives the poorer employee time to go home and have a leisurely meal; it provides the more affluent with the opportunity to stop at a café for apéritifs, go on to a restaurant and eat slowly (to the accompaniment of conversation, not a program of canned music), and to proceed afterward to another café for coffee; or perhaps, weather permitting, even to stroll in a park. For Paris is a city whose customs have evolved from a serious application of the theory that life is meant above all to be lived, and not dedicated to some ulterior abstract concept. It is a city designed to be lived in, not to be used as a market or workshop. And since living, no matter on how much or how little money, is always an art, it is not surprising that the artists should appear to have mastered it more successfully than any other group.”
Travels
~Paul Bowles
(via suckermountain)
-
"The Thing Is
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again."Ellen Bass (via justanotherquotesblog)
(via livewater)
-
-
"
“Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while.”
" Groucho Marx, American comedian and film star famed as a master of wit (1890-1977)
(Source: amiquote)
-
View high resolution
Pablo Picasso
Still Life with a Pitcher and Apples, 1919
(Source: birdsong217, via jntquigley)
-
" “When we are headed the wrong way, the last thing we need is progress.” "
Nick Bostrom, Swedish philosopher known for his work on existential risk and the anthropic principle. The director of The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, “Perfection Is Not A Useful Concept”, The European Magazine, 13.06.2011 (via amiquote)
-
" “You don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.” "
John Green, American author, An Abundance of Katherines
☞ See also: Daniel Kahneman on the riddle of experience vs. memory (via amiquote) -
"Gretel Ehrlich on wildness and life
“Gretel Ehrlich writes in her lyrical book Montana Spaces: “Wildness has no conditions, no sure routes, no peaks or goals, no source that is not instantly becoming something more than itself, then letting go of that, always becoming. It cannot be stripped to its complexity by cat scan or telescope. Rather, it is a many-pointed truth, almost a bluntness, a sudden essence like the wild strawberries strung along the ground on scarlet runners under my feet. Wildness is source and fruition at once, as if every river circled round, the mouth eating the tail—and the tail, the source…”
There is no purpose, other than itself, to wildness. It is both “source and fruition,” the mingling of cause and effect in circular logic. What Ehrlich calls wildness, call a network of vital life, an outpouring of a nearly mechanic force that seeks only to enlarge itself, and that pushes its disequilibrium into all matter, erupting in creatures and machines alike.
Wildness/life is always becoming, Ehrlich says. Becoming what? Becoming becoming. Life is on its way to further complications, further deepness and mystery, further processes of becoming and change. Life is circle of becoming, an autocatalytic set, inflaming itself with its own sparks, breeding upon itself more life and more wildness and more “becomingness.” Life has no conditions, no moments that are not instantly becoming something more than life itself.
As Ehrlich hints, wild life resembles that strange loop of the Uroboros biting its tail, consuming itself. But in truth, wild life is the far stranger loop of a snake releasing itself from its own grip, unmouthing an ever fattening tail tapering up to an ever increasingly larger mouth, birthing an ever larger tail, filling the universe with this strangeness.” "Gretel Ehrlich, American travel writer, poet, and essayist, cited in Kevin Kelly, Out of Control The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, (2004), Illustrated Edition 2008, p. 98. (via amiquote)
-
" “If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.” "
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austrian philosopher, mathematician, logician, who held the professorship in philosophy at the University of Cambridge (1889-1951), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.4311, Cosimo, Inc., 2007, p. 106. (via amiquote)
Theme: Linear by Peter Vidani
