"Make for yourself a world you can believe in. It sounds simple, I know. But it’s not. Listen, there are a million worlds you could make for yourself. Everyone you know has a completely different one - the woman in 5G, that cab driver over there, you. Sure, there are overlaps, but only in the details. Some people make their worlds around what they think reality is like. They convince themselves that they had nothing to do with their worlds’ creations and continuations. Some make their worlds without knowing it. Their universes are just sesame seeds and three-day weekends and dial tones and skinned knees and physics and driftwood and emerald earrings and books dropped in bathtubs and holes in guitars and plastic and empathy and hardwood and heavy water and high black stockings and the history of the Vikings and brass and obsolescence and burnt hair and collapsed soufflés and the impossibility of not falling in love in an art museum with the person standing next to you looking at the same painting and all the other things that just happen and are. But you want to make for yourself a world that is deliberately and meticulously personalized. A theater for your life, if I could put it like that. Don’t live an accident. Don’t call a knife a knife. Live a life that has never been lived before, in which everything you experience is yours and only yours. Make accidents on purpose. Call a knife a name by which only you will recognize it. Now I’m not a very smart man, but I’m not a dumb one, either. So listen: If you can manage what I’ve told you, as I was never able to, you will give your life meaning."
A Convergence of Birds, Jonathan Safran Foer
“…So lay aside your uncharted courses, your broken scales
and charred ideas.
Because even the best explorers know-
if you know exactly what you’re looking for,
you’ll never quite find it.
I was by your side, on those late October nights
with a little model globe, that used to twirl whenever you spoke.
Ancient philosophies and theories were fed to the fire,
while witches and pirates pounded on our windows and doors.
They cried out for pillaged bits of chocolate and sweets,
stolen from the generosity of tradition.
One year we ran out, and I felt so guilty to turn them away.
Eventually I confronted you,
and you paused to adjust your thick rimmed glasses
that had slipped down, to the brim of your nose.
Then you simply smiled, and the globe continued spinning.
“Give them the world.”
And every once in a while,
when golden sunlight filters through the cracked blinds of your office,
brightening it up at such an extreme angle-
I can still catch that globe spinning.
The papers lay untouched, in a neat stack on your desk.
And your bed is still unmade- ruffled up sheets and pillow cases
serving as planned out constellations and landmarks,
all arranged perfectly, from which you drew your chart.
You took a globe and flattened it into a map.”
from National Geographic’s “Caves of Faith”. Thank you sharanam for pointing this out.
Buddhist artwork makes me so happy.
So, Macroeconomics. What the fuck is this shit? And why did I sign up for this class?
3 week course. I want out. Wah.
"I like the dark part of the night, after midnight and before four-thirty, when it’s hollow, when ceilings are harder and farther away. Then I can breathe, and can think while others are sleeping, in a way can stop time, can have it so – this has always been my dream – so that while everyone else is frozen, I can work busily about them, doing whatever it is that needs to be done, like the elves who make the shoes while children sleep.”
— Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius)"
This is exactly how I feel and exactly why I stay up so late night after night. Except it’s worded much more beautifully here and makes the entire concept seem a lot less cynical, so thanks, Dave Eggers. You get me, I get you, we get each other, and all is well.
I am so lucky.
“In our life there is a single color, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love. All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.
When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it / a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand / as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there’s a clash between the two, it is bad art.
If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing. Will God or someone else give me the strength to breathe the breath of prayer and mourning into my paintings, the breath of prayer for redemption and resurrection?
The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.
Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things that revolve around love.”
Marc Chagall (July 1887 – March 1985) was a Russian artist of a devout Jewish family, born in Vitebsk.
I don’t even want to think about how many youtube interviews I’ve watched today. I need to start bookmarking them though… this is getting a little obsessive.
In other news, they’re coming to Orlando in early September… but touring with Paramore. I think about how great it would be to see T&S live, then I think about how many tweens will be there only for Paramore, and then i die a little. Biggest moral crisis of my life? I’d say so.
This certainly merits a -__________-.
“That was how they came to hold the most splendid funeral they could ever conceive of for an abandoned drowned man. Some women who had gone to get flowers in the neighboring villages returned with other women who could not believe what they had been told, and those women went back for more flowers when they saw the dead man, and they brought more and more until there were so many flowers and so many people that it was hard to walk about. At the final moment it pained them to return him to the waters as an orphan and they chose a father and mother from among the best people, and aunts and uncles and cousins, so that through him all the inhabitants of the village became kinsmen. Some sailors who heard the weeping from a distance went off course and people heard of one who had himself tied to the mainmast, remembering ancient fables about sirens. While they fought for the privilege of carrying him on their shoulders along the steep escarpment by the cliffs, men and women became aware for the first time of the desolation of their streets, the dryness of their courtyards, the narrowness of their dreams as they faced the splendor and beauty of their drowned man. They let him go without an anchor so that he could come back if he wished and whenever he wished, and they all held their breath for the fraction of centuries the body took to fall into the abyss. They did not need to look at one another to realize that they were no longer all present, that they would never be. But they also knew that everything would be different from then on, that their houses would have wider doors, higher ceilings, and stronger floors so that Esteban’s memory could go everywhere without bumping into beams and so that no one in the future would dare whisper the big boob finally died, too bad, the handsome fool has finally died, because they were going to paint their house fronts gay colors to make Esteban’s memory eternal and they were going to break their backs digging for springs among the stones and planting flowers on the cliffs so that in future years at dawn the passengers on great liners would awaken, suffocated by the smell of gardens on the high seas, and the captain would have to come down from the bridge in his dress uniform, with his astrolabe, his pole star, and his row of war medals and, pointing to the promontory of roses on the horizon, he would say in fourteen languages, look there, where the wind is so peaceful now that it’s gone to sleep beneath the beds, over there, where the sun’s so bright that the sunflowers don’t know which way to turn, yes, over there, that’s Esteban’s village. “
- An excerpt from The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World, a short story by Marquez. :)
