All the Wisps of a Day

[Image: “Ghostweed (#everydaybandw 868 / 2020-02-11),” by John E. Simpson; original in my SmugMug gallery. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH).]

From whiskey river (a few additional sentences included here):

Living like this means the year stops making sense, and the month and the week. The dates fall away from the days, like glass punched out of window frames, or ice cubes out of a tray into a sink, identical, dateless, nameless durational blobs, melting into an undifferentiated puddle. Is that a Saturday, a Friday, a Monday? Is that an April 13, or a November 2? Living like this means you don’t have a container anymore for the different days, can’t hold in a little twenty-four-hour-sized box set of events that constitute a unit, something you can compartmentalize, something with a beginning and an end, something to fill with a to-do list. Living like this means that it all runs together, a cold and bright December morning with your father or a lazy evening in late August, one of those sunsets that seem to take longer than is possible, where the sun just refuses to go down, where the hour seems to elongate to the point that it doesn’t seem like it can stretch any farther without detaching completely from the hour before it, like a piece of taffy, like under sea molten lava forming a new island, a piece of time detaching from the seafloor and floating up to the surface.

(Charles Yu [source])

…and:

Summer Solstice
(excerpt)

I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.
The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.
Fireflies turn on their electric wills:
an effulgence. Let me come back
whole, let me remember how to touch you
before it is too late.

(Stacie Cassarino [source])

…and:

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer and which in a general way are naturally believed, surmised, and admitted by you, but which you’ll unconsciously deny when it comes to the point of gaining hope or peace from such an admission. In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance.

(Franz Kafka [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Out Of It

I’m out of it these days. I guess I have less interest in
keeping up to date on what’s happening. I don’t know
the names of most of the current movie stars and have not
seen their movies. Same for the music scene. I have not
read what everyone is reading. I don’t know what’s on
TV. I’m out of it, but not too far out. I figure somewhere
between 12 to 18 inches. I’ve noticed that when someone
speaks to me he or she seems to be addressing a space
just a little to my right or left. When it first happened I
thought my acquaintance was speaking to someone else.
I looked around but there was no one else there. I’ve
tried moving to adjust the conversational direction but
the speaker only readjusts. I realized that if I kept moving
our conversation would be going in circles. So now I just
stand still and let the talk continue at cross-purposes. It
is getting worse. Sometimes I can’t make any sense at all
of what someone is saying, as if he were speaking Welsh.
Then I remember that I am in Wales and he is speaking
Welsh.

(Louis Jenkins [source])

…and:

The blue light of television flickers on the cave wall. If the fellow crawls out of the cave, what does he see? Not the sun itself, but night, and the two thousand visible stars. Once, I tried to converse with him, the fellow who crawled out of his blue-lit cave to the real world. He had looked into this matter of God. He had to shout to make himself heard: “How do you stand the wind out here?”

I don’t. Not for long. I drive a schoolkids’ car pool. I shouted back, “I don’t! I read Consumer Reports every month!” It seemed unlikely he heard. The wind blew into his face. He turned and faced the lee. I do not know how long he stayed out. A little at a time does for me—a little every day.

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and:

#56: Diaries (pace Kafka) seem flawed in one significant respect: exactly because they nail down a day’s details, they drain nostalgia of its imaginative charms and power. But in imagining so, we forget the inescapable truth of diaries: they are written for us, ourselves. Faced with the mundane sorrows, smiles, and tediums of today, even with just five minutes’ hindsight, who could possibly resist the temptation to tart things up just a bit? No one will ever know, whispers the small, all-but-unheard voice that drives the diarist’s pen, as he adds the charming detail, as she sharpens the poignancy, and — if nothing else — scratches out one word of narrative or exposition to replace it with a finer one.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)